


Apparuit Iam Beatitudo Vestra

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Office, Co-workers, Dystopia, M/M, Morality, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pre-Way Back, Schoolboys, Underage Sex, Workplace Relationship, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 02:46:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5273612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alpahs are assigned work duties at fifteen, and thus at fifteen Roj Blake begins to work in the Aquitar Project's Computing Division, under Doctor Kerr Avon. Neither of them actually believes in love at first sight: they just have to live with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apparuit Iam Beatitudo Vestra

The Federation assigned work duties to Alphas at the age of fifteen. The youths continued on at school, but spent some days every week serving as apprentices on state projects (or in other industries, if the companies involved had filed the appropriate requests with the government and had paid the state for the students' labor). Particularly high-performing students were rewarded with (or exploited via) roles on especially prestigious projects, which would lead to better positions for them later in life.

Getting Aquitar was a coup, and Roj Blake knew it. He didn't care, exactly, but he did know that he should. It was a mark of the state's confidence in him, his rather pompous tutor explained when Roj didn't respond with quite the enthusiasm the tutor thought the assignment merited. There were no other apprentices in this department; he had been chosen from thousands.

Roj didn't bother to explain that the state’s confidence was quite misplaced, at least as far as his personal loyalty was concerned. He did, however, turn up at Aquitar's Computing Division on time, in a pressed uniform, and was duly oriented. His tour concluded with an introduction to the division head.

"Actually, he's the closest person to your age in Computing," the woman showing Roj around informed him as they approached the director’s door. "About twenty-five, I think? Though he's a little—well. Shouldn't say." Difficult, then, Roj concluded. Not well liked. But he had to be clever—being a division head at 'about twenty-five' was hardly usual.

His guide knocked on a door (plaque: Doctor Kerr Avon) tentatively, and got a 'Come' for her trouble.

There were no unembarrassing terms for what happened to Roj then. No scientific language could clean it up and make it safe. No flat description of the neurological effects on his brain and the physiological responses of his body could make 'love at first sight' anything less than ridiculous. Perhaps he was just ill, suddenly and terribly so—No. Roj knew better than that. No sickness felt like your heartbeat slowing to a crawl, like your chest caving in, like time stopping and then _rushing_ back in, as though it were water, dammed up.

It wasn't the Doctor Kerr Avon’s looks (though Roj liked them, quite a lot). It was a sense of somehow knowing him, absolutely, in the very instant of seeing him. There was no need to question it, no point in doing so. This was the most certain thing Roj could imagine.

The way the other man's eyes slightly widened and then immediately narrowed again, like the quick open-shut of a door, like the twitching-back of curtains after someone had peered out into the street; the way he cleared his throat—none of it cured the ludicrousness of Roj’s predicament, but it did give Roj the suspicion that he wasn't totally alone, he wasn’t the only one affected by what had happened. And that was certainly something. But how _could_ he have been alone? Imagine a thing like that, only touching one of them—it was too strong and too predicated on a sympathy between them for the other man not to have felt it too.

"Ah," Doctor Avon said, after a moment, regaining his composure. "You must be the new departmental apprentice I didn't ask for. You were supposed to arrive next week."

"That’s right," Blake said with a smile. Doctor Avon's eyes narrowed again, like he resented Blake's ease. "They changed the schedule," Blake offered, not as an apology, but as an explanation.

"So I see. I'm not certain we can use you," Doctor Avon said curtly.

Roj's guide coughed. "Begging your pardon, sir—Roj has demonstrated a lot of talent in the logistics and spatial aptitude exams. We thought we could put him to work on—"

"Running the models," Doctor Avon conceded. "And, of course, state projects never let go of personnel, if they can possibly help it. A bulky department is a happy department."

This last was quite sarcastic, and Roj's guide, clearly of the Model Citizen type, bristled under her pink-faced politeness. Roj found he wasn't surprised by the other man's unusual degree of open cynicism. It was part and parcel of the affinity between them. Doctor Avon questioned things on instinct, didn’t have a lot of patience with institutional platitudes: the same was true of Blake.

"You did take a state contract," Roj’s guide reminded Doctor Avon.

"Yes, I did, didn't I?" Doctor Avon mused, a little winsome, as if wondering why on earth he’d done that.

"Could you tell me about these models I'll be running, sir?" Roj leaned forward, catching Doctor Avon's eye, only to watch it skitter away from him.

"No," Doctor Avon said shortly. "I'm busy. One of the junior technicians can take you over the lot. Welcome on board—" Doctor Avon hesitated over what to call him, and then dropped the sentence full stop.

"Thank you, sir."

Roj stuck out his hand, determined. With a slight flinch, barely perceptible, Doctor Avon took it. Slightly cool skin. Compact, no doubt competent hands, with unexpectedly soft palms. Roj gave Doctor Avon’s hand one firm pump and then released it, having memorized everything he could of the older man's touch in those moments. He'd need that, later.

At the door, Roj glanced back to find Doctor Avon's eyes on him. He kept his smirk to himself until he was out in the hallway with his guide.

"See what I mean?" she said in an undertone, shaking her head. "No team spirit."

"Oh, he's all right," Roj said, glancing back at the closed door with a pinch of longing. They hadn't had a chance to properly talk yet. But they would do. He'd make sure of it.

"Well, he was nicer to you than he usually is," she said, giving the door a resentful glance herself.

"A division head that young probably feels the need to prove his authority," Roj observed. Though Doctor Avon might also just be cantankerous by nature. Roj thought he could handle that, too.

His guide looked him over, a little surprised. "Not a bad hypothesis," she admitted. "You're a generous one."

Roj shrugged, then smiled politely at her. "So where can I find a junior technician who's _not_ too busy to tell me what to do?" he asked, and she laughed and turned him over to an appropriate underling.

***

The past year had not been easy on Kerr Avon. Almost one year ago, without either his permission or his approval, his division had been given the use of a clever, able assistant from one of the dome’s elite magnet technical schools. Rather than a boon, or at worst an object of personal apathy, this had been to Avon a sort of torture. He had been, almost immediately, plunged into a bizarre carnal obsession with the boy. And boy Roj Blake was, despite his height and his frankly unnatural composure.

Avon had never felt anything else of the kind in his life. He was horrified and repulsed by the idea that he might be some sort of child-botherer. But no one else Blake's age appealed to him in the slightest. That was a relief, but not enough of one.

Avon was also vastly disappointed in himself. He'd believed himself to be the sort of person who went in for sophisticated intellectual and emotional attractions between people who were very much adults. But then he couldn't deny Roj Blake's intelligence, his wit, or the sickening degree to which he himself ached to touch Blake—Blake’s already-broad shoulders, his hair, his smooth, never-shaved cheek. Avon didn't let himself think of Blake while masturbating, but he knew he had to actively defend against it—to determinedly imagine mature women, lest lithesome youth or masculinity slip into the likeness of what he was all too aware he really wanted: his lovely assistant, panting for instruction or fucking him with the desperation and vigor of his years. Every time Blake called him 'sir' (and he never called Avon anything else), Avon _broke_ a little under the weight of his own stupid, unshakable want.

He'd tried being harsh with the boy (and this was the term he used in his mind, to make it relentlessly clear to himself that Roj Blake must be, to him, as untouchable as a distant star), to try and make it easier on himself. But the boy had responded with unrelenting good humor, and Avon's tech team, who liked Blake and treated him a little like a mascot, had resented Avon for it. It hadn't diminished his interest in the boy a whit, either. It had made it worse, in fact, because Blake was gloriously tough. He turned Avon's most withering criticisms aside with reasonable responses and confident smiles. As though he knew why Avon was uncomfortable with him. As though he understood that adversity between them was safe, conducted as it was within the bounds of Avon's sick doting on him. _Wretched_ little bastard. Though he _couldn't_ know, couldn't _possibly_.

But dote Avon certainly did (though—he thought, he hoped, he _prayed_ —discreetly). Blake-days were ingrained in his mind—he never needed to consult the schedule. Of course Blake could go home early, if he needed to (though that was a bittersweet favor, for Avon, and he appreciated that Blake didn’t often ask it of him). Blake could shift his work hours about as he wished. Blake could have the plummest jobs, whatever would benefit his educational development, whatever he particularly enjoyed.

Avon caught himself smiling days later at something Blake had said. Whipping his head involuntarily to track that crisp school uniform (oh, he knew there were words for men who wanted what he wanted) moving through the crowded, vast entry hall of the Aquitar building. He was at turns stiff and formal with Blake, and too kind––chipping in far too much, anonymously, for Blake’s pooled office birthday gift. He didn't dare buy Blake anything in his own right—after all, he wanted to give Blake all manner of things, and if he started, he didn't know if he could stop. In this case, the birthday in question had also had a special, private significance to Avon. Blake was sixteen now. Therefore, if Blake allowed it, Avon could legally touch him. Could fuck him over his leather-topped desk in his private office, with scandal rather than prison as a consequence. He shouldn't and he _wouldn't_ , but oh, he _could_. Avon perversely thought that a little worth celebrating.

After his early harshness (Avon hadn't initially known what to make of the sudden, charged gravity the world had acquired when they'd met), Avon had—unbent a little. He tried to avoid Blake, as best he could, but he was awful at it. Not a Blake-day went by that Avon didn't let himself swing by Blake's desk, gnawingly hungry after the boy's absence (Blake-days did not, after all, fall subsequently).

"And how are you getting on?" he'd ask with a tight smile. Blake would draw him out with questions about what had transpired in his absence, and Avon would prop a hip against Blake's desk and cross his arms and tell him, leaving in the sardonic comments and private jokes he edited out of the official daily reports. Blake grinned and laughed and sympathized with his frustrations.

Avon liked Blake's ready smile, his rolling laugh. He liked to be the cause of them. Blake frowned with gratifying commiseration, and Avon wanted to lick the sympathy out of his mouth, he wanted to kiss the creases laughter caused around Blake’s eyes. The hollows of Blake's shoulders and neck violently demanded similar attentions, but Avon didn't negotiate with terrorists.

He didn't just pass Blake gossip, he also used Blake as a PA where possible. Kept him close, in a purely professional capacity. He _liked_ Blake. And that made how much Avon wanted Blake more of a betrayal of Blake's youth and inexperience. It was a person he wanted to violate, not a body he wanted to fuck. Blake was one of the few people he truly liked, and yet the way he ‘liked’ Blake was inherently disrespectful to him. And Blake seemed to like _him_ in return. At least, he chatted eagerly, and came to Avon with reports and questions. Mostly about work. Occasionally about other subjects. Against his better judgment, Avon had let Blake make something of a confidant of him. At _least_ Blake never wanted to talk about his youthful romantic misadventures—Avon didn't know how he'd respond, and didn't want to find out.

Avon looked forward to the end of the torture—to the close of Blake’s year-long placement, the day Blake would finally leave. It would be bittersweet, and Avon suspected he might want to leave Aquitar himself, after it happened. But Blake would be transferred to another project and removed from Avon’s orbit entirely, and Avon would never look him up again (or if he did, he certainly wouldn't do anything about it). There would be an end to the temptation. At last a means of forgetting that generous smile and those arresting, intense, changeable eyes that regarded Avon so seriously. Hazel—leaning into brown or green, or stubbornly refusing to give up their indeterminacy, depending on the color of shirt Blake wore with his Academy tunic.

Avon had lowered himself to fuck a nineteen-year-old professional with hazel eyes at a clean state-run brothel. But the eyes hadn't been warm and intelligent like Blake's, and Avon would have paid the same inordinately large tab simply to hold Blake for a night, if he could have done the thing without warping the boy—he did know what 'grooming' was, and that he didn't want any part of it. Or rather he _did_ , and that was why he had to stop himself from offering to have coffee with the boy to chat about his future, to tell him how clever he was and to ask about his plans. Blake _was_ clever. And Avon did want to know his plans. But he couldn't, _mustn’t_ ply Blake with attention and approval and use his own age and position as weapons to mold Blake into something he could fuck, something that would worship him.

Though they were such awful, pretty thoughts. Blake promised, by the build of him, to grow a strong, unyielding frame to match his personality, but, just now, he was still supple. Could still twine sweetly into Avon. He could sit in his office chair with Blake in his lap, hands wrapped around that still-pliant waist. Don’t worry, Blake, I’ll take care of everything. Let me take care of you. Trusting eyes, green with no clothing to confuse the issue, slipping closed as Avon stroked Blake’s trembling sides. As he lifted Blake gently, inexorably, and shoved his twitching little darling down onto his cock.

This was why he couldn’t take Blake out for a coffee to chat about his future. Because Avon thought Blake was destined for greatness, but the future he personally envisioned for Blake involved the boy whimpering and squirming on a thing too large for him as Avon whispered, There now, it’s all right, relax. Involved fucking up into him, clenching his hands on Blake’s torso as Blake shook his head and set that stubborn jaw and said he wanted this, loved it, _please_ sir, deeper, he could take it.

But the horrible, dangerous fantasies (how _good_ he could make Blake’s first time—how gentle and well-planned and caring, no adolescent clumsiness for his Blake) that made Avon hard under his desk, that infiltrated his dreams and reeled him in against his will, would finally stop when Blake _left._

***

“What’s this?” Avon asked, taking the pad from where Blake had set it on the desk. After the first time (which lived in his memory), Avon was careful never to touch Blake by so much as accepting anything from his hands. His imagination certainly didn’t need more fuel.

Eleven months into Blake’s apprenticeship, so one month to freedom. It would hurt when he left, Avon knew. It might hurt—rather a lot. It was for the best.

“A non-transfer request,” Blake said casually.

Avon felt his whole body still.

“What.”

“I want to serve another year, sir. At least. Rather than being shifted onto another project.” Blake raised an eyebrow at him. “That _is_ what a non-transfer request means.”

The brat was _joking_ about this. “The whole point of this program is to give you experience in a variety of sectors. You can’t stunt your career development because you like the canteen here, or whatever’s keeping you.”

“As it happens I don’t particularly like the canteen, sir. I’m doing good work on Aquitar, interesting work, and Aquitar’s prestigious enough that anything else would frankly be a step down _and_ less challenging.”

“It’s unlike you,” Avon observed, “to care overmuch about how prestigious an assignment is.”

“No, I’m not all that interested in advancing my career in Engineering or Projects—I don’t know what I want to do, but it isn’t that.”

Here were the beginnings of the intimate, mentoring tête-à-tête Avon had avoided by never offering it to Blake. Avon wanted both to press and to back off, to shut the whole thing down.

“Then hadn’t you better find out, by moving along?”

Blake shrugged. “Realistically, my next two options are IMIPAK, which is some classified weapons development initiative, and Radical Terraforming. I don’t want to work on weapons even in a civilian capacity, and I don’t think I’d make it through their psych-battery anyway. That’s out. And the only thing radical about Radical Terraforming is the name. Rumor has it they’ve been stuck in the water for ages. Working there is supposed to be about as fun and as worth the effort as running on a fixed-exerciser.”

Avon knew. It was why he’d squirmed out of Radical Terraforming himself, at Blake’s age, and gone for the civilian side of Installation Design, and then Space-Vehicle Computing Architecture. He suggested these programs to Blake, knowing even as he did it that, outside their computing divisions, where Avon’s outsize talent and the approval of his superiors had given him additional leeway, the programs weren’t known for being good to their interns. SV had been hauled up before the Council last year for using their allotment of young Alphas as unpaid menial labor they couldn’t be bothered to train. Blake deserved better than filing. No one else was likely to give Blake the attention, license and responsibilities Avon did.

“Don’t you think I’m doing a good job, sir?” Blake was visibly a little unsure of himself. As much as Avon admired his customary confidence, this attitude made him want to soothe the boy. “Everyone else signed off on it,” Blake said, rubbing his neck with his hand. “Of course if you don’t want me, if you’d prefer a different assistant—” He looked up at Avon. Bit his lip. “Keep me on, sir. Please?”

Suppressing a shudder, Avon pressed his stylus to the pad and wrote his name, signing his own death warrant. It seemed he could deny Blake nothing.

“Your performance is consistently above-standard. You learn quickly and work well. We will, of course, benefit from another year of your assistance, if you are willing to offer it.”

He slid the pad across the table to Blake. What had he done? (Yet even through his horror, Avon felt an ink-dark shiver of delight. Blake wanted to stay precisely where he was. With him. Well now, Avon wanted that too. Some days he thought it'd take nothing at all to get Blake to come to him. Some days he thought he could even keep Blake sweet and silent after. Those days he shuddered and took punishing, _freezing_ showers and told himself to _stop it_.)

“I’m most willing, sir.” Blake gave him a steady, intent look. That really was too much.

“Don’t call me ‘sir’,” Avon snapped, looking away from the boy. It was too good. The remembered ring of it haunted his dreams. Yes sir, _please_ sir, oh, _oh_ , _sir_.

“Whatever you like, Av’n,” Blake agreed with a smile, pronouncing it like he’d swallowed the second vowel whole. _Oh_. God, it was so much _worse_ than ‘sir’, and Avon couldn’t take it back. Blake watched his reaction, and Avon worried for a wild moment that some hint had slipped in through his eyes.

“When—do you plan on doing something about our other problem?”

Blake asked this with unusual delicacy, and Avon frowned, wondering what aspect of their work Blake referred to.

“I don’t take your meaning.”

“These things do happen, you know. Someone twice your age flirts with me every work-day. He propositioned me in the lift just this morning, actually. I said I was taken.” Blake was watching him, carefully. “ _Am_ I taken, Avon? I’m sixteen now, it’s not illegal. And it does happen, sometimes, on projects like this.”

Avon felt all the blood draining from his face.

Blake knew. Blake had waited for him to sign another year of indentures and had then sprung this revelation on him. Blake _wanted him_. Meanwhile someone else, some fifty-year old (if Blake was to be believed—and Avon rather thought he was, though he was _also_ clearly using it strategically, and that in and of itself showed a frightening degree of insight on the boy's part) regularly tried it on with _his Blake_. Not a chance in hell.

“What’s his name?” Avon asked in a silky, not undangerous tone.

“Immaterial,” Blake answered. “I took care of it.”

“If anyone behaves inappropriately to you,” Avon said through his teeth, which were fixed in a smile, “I will see them—” Avon felt his cheek twitch, “fired.”

“Oo, _fired_.” Blake laughed. “Nice save. So not yet, then.”

“Any adult who takes advantage of you now is _not_ worth your time,” Avon said, voice cold. “Don’t let _anyone_ flatter you into believing otherwise.”

“Well, I think you must be a very good person, and quite worth my time, to restrain yourself when it's very clear you want me.”

Blake caught and held his gaze, inescapable, and Avon knew that even if Blake was speared on his cock, he’d be the one pinned like a butterfly underneath him. What was boiling in him was something worse than lust, and lust had been unimaginably bad.

Avon felt like he was dragging himself out of the bottom of the well of Blake’s eyes, crawling up the sides, hand over hand. “You're mistaken. I don't want you.”

“No,” Blake agreed, eyes tight with annoyance, hurt, at the rejection. Avon wanted, absurdly, to apologize, to say he hadn't meant it. “You're right, you don't 'want' me. I just assumed you’d prefer a euphemism to the truth. Well. I'll ask again next year, shall I?”

Avon didn’t answer.

“Avon—” Blake said after a moment, voice a shade more hesitant—an undercurrent, there, of the child he was. “You know I’m staying for you? Not the work. _Certainly_ not the vile cafeteria. You.”

And Blake left, having told Avon that Avon was in love. In love. He never had been, before. Not, then, a strange fixation. The fleeting, inexplicable thought that had welled up in his brain when he'd first seen the boy ('He'll be the death of me') had been not a random misfire of a suddenly over-taxed mind, but the deathly snake-like clench and squeeze of a love that intended never to let him go. Have the boy or not, it would remain.

Did he dress up a sordid passion with the name? Well, yes—there was in his longing a sickness, a carnality that ravished his own mind for the want of its real target. But that was the tip of the knife, the edge and not the blade entire. If Avon had wanted a tumble, the whole thing would have been easier to resist and more easily begged off with substitutes. No, he wanted everything—Blake's future and his ripe, bright soul, to crack open his bones and tenderly suckle out the marrow. To train Blake like a vine, up against the frame of him while Blake was still pliant; to break him like a falconer would a bird of prey; to breed Blake into something that would always need him.

And some of that, at least, Blake knew.

Avon went home early that day. He thought about leaving the job, about breaking his contract, about fleeing the whole fucking planet—that would show Blake. But there would be serious professional consequences. It was decidedly not legal to leave a state contract before time, and doing so without a _very_ powerful ally to back you (much less to leave Earth without authorization) wasn't safe. And Avon couldn't quite bring himself to do it, even if he could find such an ally. And he didn't think it'd help, if he did. Obsession he might have been able to shake, but love would never let him go.

***

Blake was seventeen. He came into Avon's office with a second non-transfer form and letters of recommendation from the rest of the department.

"Please sir, may I have another?" Blake asked with an ironic smile, handing him the datapad.

Avon mostly pretended last year's conversation on this theme hadn't happened; Blake mostly let him.

It had taken a few weeks, after the last form had been signed, for Avon to start properly talking to Blake again. It should have taken longer, possibly forever, but Avon had wanted it too much. And his own unhappiness he might have borne, but he’d hated Blake's visible dejection too much to keep freezing him out, even as he knew he should have done so for the boy's own good.

When Avon had forced himself to have a casual conversation with Blake again, he had clearly seen gratitude and relief in Blake's eyes. It had awed Avon—how much power he had, how infatuated _Blake_ evidently was with _him_. And he’d resented it enormously—that Blake should test one of his few moral resolutions like this.

 _I am doing this for **you** , _Avon had thought acidly, _I am keeping myself apart for **you** , and it's hell, and you don't even appreciate it._ But then if Blake had done the reverse to him—oh, Avon knew he wouldn't have liked _that,_ whatever the reason. Not at all.

The last time he’d signed a contract like this, Blake had waited until the proverbial ink was dry before telling Avon that he knew what was going on between them. This time he was asking Avon to consent to his staying, in full knowledge of the reason he was staying. And he’d done it via a bit of cheap innuendo that brought a guilty heat to Avon’s cheeks (and cock). He’d have spanked Blake very happily indeed.

“ _Shut up_ —” and there was a slightly awkward pause, where Avon should have said a name but didn’t and just breathed instead, steadying himself.

He signed this second Faustian pact, and pushed the datapad neatly across the table at his tormentor. Keeping Blake wasn’t fucking him. It wasn’t.

“Blake,” the boy said gently. “You always avoid saying my name. It drives me mad—after all, I call you Avon. At your invitation. So call me ‘Blake’, like you would one of your friends.” No good telling Blake those were few and far between—Blake was pressing on, tapping a finger against his lips. “ _Not_ like I’m a child and you’re an adult, if you please.”

“That is precisely the case.”

“For now, I’ll concede you think it is,” Blake offered. “I bet you don't let anyone call you 'Kerr.' Pity. It's a nice name.”

Avon proceeded to change the subject with a massive wrench, calling Blake out for a minor mistake. At first Blake bluffed it out with good humor, but Avon dug the knife in, emphasizing Blake's immaturity, his incompetence, what a _bother_ Avon found him. Unfair. Blake was far too mature for his age or for Avon's comfort. Blake looked a strong-jawed young man now, hardly a boy at all.

The error had been slight—Avon could be both kinder to and harder on Blake than he was on anyone else. Blake, upset, tried to say he'd fix it right now, then, and retreated out the door. But, in control of the encounter for once, Avon followed him, dressing him down in front of their co-workers, humiliating him a little.

There. Blake would back off, and he—he could be safe. _Blake_ would be safe. Though he wouldn't thank Avon for it.

Blake stormed off, furious and visibly hurt—though untouched by shame. Avon didn't know that Blake had any. He’d yet to see evidence to that effect.

Lin, a team-lead who’d watched the tail end of the argument, cleared his throat. "You could go easy on Blake, you know."

Avon realized he’d been looking after Blake, and turned to look at Lin instead. "Why should I?"

"Well," Lin said, a bit uncomfortable, "I mean—you know he's had that massive crush on you for years."

Avon gave Lin an unreadable, wry expression.

"He's one of our best people, despite his age,” Lin continued. “He talks about you constantly—admires you no end. Your approval means the world to him. So he only needs a bit of telling, and a harsh word from you goes a bit further than you might mean it to."

"Mind you, he sees less of your cheek than the rest of us do," pointed out Owomo, a data analyst who herself saw less of it by virtue of being Avon's grandmothers' age, and Avon’s being the sort of person who had been raised to love and fear his grandmothers. "I'd have said you were fond of him, before that display. For all he's a communal assistant, you can treat him like your personal property.”

Lin snorted in agreement. “Heaven forbid we lend Blake out to another team without asking you first."

Oh god. He’d never realized, never _thought––_ But if people knew Avon was ... fond of Blake, they might start to suspect more damning things. (Somehow Avon didn't mind them knowing Blake wanted _him_. Good. Maybe knowing Blake's affections were engaged would put off anyone unworthy of him, like whoever the hell it was who had propositioned Blake in the lift—the project was far too large for Avon to generate a good mental list of suspects, but he watched everyone who interacted with Blake closely.)

"I'll take your advice under consideration," Avon told his deputies with a less-than-pleasant smile. And he did. Though not quite as they'd intended.

To subdue his own broiling libido and to manage the suspicions of people around him, Avon started aggressively picking people up in bars, clinically and efficiently fucking his way through the Alpha dome scene. He deliberately went for no one younger than himself, chose no one who looked even slightly like _him_. Someone had to control the signal-to-noise ratio, and it was going to be Avon. Thus Avon made sure a few of his partners were from other divisions of the project. He made sure there were rumors.

It wouldn't have been _illegal_ to fuck Blake. Not _quite_ illegal, no, but it would certainly get Avon dismissed, see his career in ashes. Avon would be hiring poison. It would be an Alpha child defiled, and that would mean something. No one would want Avon on any project that took on apprentices, and that was all the major ones. He’d be marked as a moral deviant in the Federation’s not-at-all-secret Citizen Records, and Blake would be reshuffled. If Blake had parents worth their salt, someone would be around in due course to dislocate Avon's jaw. He richly deserved it. In his mind he'd done unpardonable things to their son (though Avon had _never_ encouraged the fantasies, or let himself enjoy them to the accompaniment of physical gratification). And in reality, he hadn't been proactive enough to ship Blake off the instant he suspected Blake was infected with his malady as well.

And then one day, while Avon was in private conference with Blake (Avon’s limbs still stiff from an evening with someone who'd punished him for his uncommitted crimes, without knowing what they absolved), he noticed that Blake kept staring past him today. He noticed the flat, listless voice that Blake was using to answer him.

"What is it?" Avon asked, trying to curb the softness of his tone. "Are you ill?"

Blake looked it. Pale. His active, mobile features still. This indisposition was especially strange because Blake had only been unwell twice, in all the time Avon had known him. There was a doctor on site, perhaps Avon should take him down.

"No," Blake said succinctly. Which itself was worrisome. Blake was talkative and gregarious, and customarily detained Avon on any pretext.  

"Blake. Is something wrong?" Avon asked, frowning.

"You're not even being subtle about it," Blake said, suddenly. And Avon realized that the edge of last night's bite mark must be visible at his neck, above his collar. He bruised easily, he knew. He realized that Blake could see it; that Blake had soldiered through the rumors, disquieted, but when forced to look at proof, his customary fortitude had abandoned him. He'd slogged on through a meeting he couldn't possibly be attending to the substance of, until Avon had bullied him about his failure to pretend he was happy about the situation as well. God, Avon hadn't even considered what this would do to—What if Blake hated him for this?

Avon stood, awkward, not sure what to do with himself. He walked around the desk to join Blake, trailing his fingers across the leather top.

"Do you think about me when you do it?" Blake asked, brusquely.

"No," Avon said, staring behind Blake at the door. What if it should open now? "No, I—Anything but." And sully the image of Blake by bringing it into the various sordid rooms he fucked Blake's replacements in? Their too-skilled mouths were never Blake's to him. Their hands never his dear, well-studied hands.

"What do you want?" Blake asked. When no answer was forthcoming, Blake evidently resolved to ask all his questions, to keep going until he got one. "What do you get out of them? What would you like me to do?” Blake’s voice was rough. It shook, a little. “Do you want me to fuck around?" Avon's hand tightened, white-knuckled on the back of Blake's chair, but he didn't look at Blake. Blake pushed on. "Get experience, until I can do whatever whoever's worked you over _this_ time did to you?"

Blake wouldn't need it, any of it—the equipment, the games others used to rouse and hold Avon’s attention. If Blake touched him, Avon thought he'd struggle not to fall apart in his hands at the slightest provocation.

Blake's voice was thick with unshed tears, now. First lowering one leg and then the other, Avon dropped to his knees next to Blake, clutching the arm of Blake's chair.

"No," Avon said quietly, not quite looking at him, staring half at that door and half at Blake's slightly shaking shoulder. "No, Blake—darling, please don't cry.  Please—I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—I won't. I won't do it again. I only wanted—"

Avon swallowed against the tightness of his throat. He'd only wanted to slake his thirst, to make his body forget the reason why it thrummed with insistent, insatiable demand. He'd wanted to forget Blake, and to make sure everyone knew that Avon couldn't possibly want him. Some apology _that_ would make.

As though unable to control his body, Avon hesitantly stroked his hand over Blake's sleeve, and shuddered. He'd never admitted it before. Blake had known it all the same, but Avon had never _said_. There it was. Blake had won it from him, at the price of tears. And if Blake left the room, everyone would see his face, would wonder what Avon had done to make him cry.

Hesitantly, Avon kissed away the tear running down Blake's cheek, and then he kissed Blake's forehead. He stroked Blake’s face, and then wove his fingers through the loose curls Blake wore slightly longer than regulation permitted. Avon never called Blake on that, because he love-hated the soft temptation of them. _Darling_ , he thought instead of letting himself say it again, feeling sick and freed by having let it out of his mouth. Darling, _darling._

"Promise me you won't," Blake asked, voice low with anger, and Avon nodded sharply, knowing it was absolute. That his word, given to Blake, was binding until Blake released him. Fine. A passionate celibacy, a truce he brokered with his body wherein he allowed himself at last to think of Blake when he brought himself off in exchange for cruder satisfactions. Anything, so long as Blake stopped looking miserable. Besides, he’d made his point, established the right sort of rumors about himself—the safe sort of rumors. They wouldn’t die quickly.

"Just have me," Blake begged him, and Avon shut his eyes. "If you need this, let me give it to you. I _want_ to."

"No," Avon breathed.

"Why?" Blake demanded. Avon didn't answer. " _Why_ am I not good enough?" Blake pressed.

" _Never_ say that," Avon hissed, clenching his hand on Blake’s arm spasmodically.

"Won't you even talk this through with me?" Blake said a little desperately.

No. Avon couldn't risk it. Blake didn't need explanations––he would only disagree with them, argue his way around them. Better Blake think patent nonsense, suppose Avon didn't want to dirty his hands with him, than that some piece of Blake's sophistry, wedded to Avon’s own want, cause Avon to forget himself, allow him to _rationalize_ one of the world's few remaining outright sins.

Blake sighed, then pulled himself together. "We'll—later. We can—"

Avon pulled back. Blake rubbed his eyes and his face clean with his hand, and Avon's heart constricted. They both stood, Avon facing his own desk, avoiding looking at him. He heard the door handle turning under Blake's hand, and for a moment he could feel Blake's eyes on his back. Then the pressure lifted, and the door creaked shut.

Avon walked slowly back to his chair and sat once more. He toyed with a pen and thought, with a kind of dark joy, that he was _glad_ to have traded other people, to have forsaken all others for the shadow and the thought of Blake. That he couldn't wait to try it out.

So much for half-measures and protestations of personal integrity. Blake either chipped away bits of Avon's soul or showed him the thin inadequacy of what he thought he believed in. Partly formed values collapsed in Avon. Useless to try and articulate how vital he thought wealth and security were to Blake, who wanted and deserved better. More, than _just_ to be safe. Blake wasn't drawn to the career paths the Federation laid before him, wanted this decidedly perilous relationship, didn't seem to think a safe life in which he didn't obtain the things he valued particularly worth the living. And the things Blake valued weren't to be bought.

Useless, too, for Avon to try and explain the morality that governed him, and which Blake unraveled by pulling at loose threads. Blake wouldn’t have been convinced, and arguments that didn’t move Blake sat flat and dead in Avon, now. Besides, neither wealth nor security would give him what he most wanted—Blake’s autonomy, his full development, the knowledge that Avon hadn’t warped what he loved in loving it. ‘Free will’ came closer to the mark, but there it needed some protective addendum, because Blake would have freely, cheerfully martyred himself for Avon’s lust without understanding what he might be giving up in doing it. Avon didn’t know who he was anymore, and he didn’t know whether Blake was the making or the undoing of him.

***

Avon had known that, even having extracted his apology and his promise, Blake was still angry with him. Blake's anger burned right at the surface, and was difficult to miss. He was furious with Avon both for having refused him again, and for having been unfaithful. Why not? He had been, in both their eyes. He had given others what belonged rightly to Blake.

Avon hadn’t known quite _how_ angry until he and Blake came to the end of a tense, loaded exchange about progress reports a few days later, just before everyone was due to go home. Blake was leading a team now—young for it, but he was naturally very, very good with people, as Avon had awful proof. He represented the division to outsiders better than Avon did. Only Blake’s age prevented Avon from delegating the bulk of his public speaking responsibilities to Blake—it was still a little hard for people who didn’t know Blake to take him seriously.

Though everything was, of course, relative. Seventeen-year olds before Blake had led apprentice riots, in the middle ages and in the last century. Seventeen-year olds had led armies once as well. Seventeen-year olds and younger had also once married men Avon’s age and older— _Emma_ and _Sense and Sensibility_ were banned, but Avon knew from a joke or two that Blake had read them anyway, just as he had in his own youth. But the line between childhood and adulthood was culturally defined, and here and now, Blake wasn’t yet a man.

What Blake _was_ was incandescently furious. Maybe one day he’d learn to control his temper and use it as another weapon in his arsenal, but now anger sat in Blake like a landmine, a thing that had to be answered, that stood to hurt him as well as its target. So the casual tone in which Blake said, “So I take it you’re not going to ‘do the honors’ then?” didn’t fool Avon for a moment.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Avon said (after a moment of panic—fear and arousal _spiking_ in him). Falling back on an earlier strategy, letting ‘I don’t know’ stand in for ‘I can’t afford to understand you.’

“I said we’d talk about it later, and it’s later." Blake glared at Avon, levelly, his tone professional, demanding. "You’re not the only person burdened with a body, and it has to happen at some point.”

Avon’s expression made Blake’s hard look shift into something more accommodating. That _Blake_ should pity him, Avon thought. It was ridiculous.

“Avon—say you want me to wait for you, and I will.”

“You should have experiences and liaisons appropriate to your age,” Avon said noncommittally. He kept his face absolutely neutral. _Hating_ it.

He intended _never_ to have Blake. No passage of time could erase the fact that Blake, a sensitive _child_ , had picked up on how much an older man wanted him and had been flattered, had mirrored that want back at Avon. Despite efforts to the contrary (marred by occasional lapses of judgment), Avon suspected he'd thoroughly groomed Blake.

There would always be a gulf in their experiences. A power-imbalance, a prohibition in how formative he’d been in Blake’s life. He knew that wasn’t how it looked without context—he knew that Blake got the better of him as often as not, despite his youth. But in reality Avon suspected that Blake’s hyper-developed powers of articulation and social acuity had outstripped his development in other fields. That Blake had learned how to get what he wanted before he’d learned _what_ he wanted. (And Avon sometimes wondered if Blake had pushed himself to grow up fast for Avon, because Blake had understood what Avon wanted, wanted _of him_. What Avon liked.)

Avon had been a little like that himself—he’d been able to do graduate-level maths at seventeen, he _hadn’t_ been an adult. It was a pity that Blake’s areas of expertise were so front-facing, that they made for such an effective facade of maturity. Avon had to constantly remind himself that Blake was a cleverly constructed Potemkin village, _not_ a man, capable of responding to Avon's longing for him as such.

Therefore, since Avon would never be able to touch Blake, would never allow himself to have him, Blake—couldn’t and shouldn’t wait interminably. Perhaps if Blake met and liked someone more age-appropriate (not cheaply and in haste, in anger—let Blake fall in love so well he thought Avon just a crush, though even the thought of it made Avon sick), he could move on. That might loose the ropes around Avon’s heart. Although Avon never expected to be cured, now, the pressure on him might be slightly relieved if Blake _didn’t_ love him back. If he didn't catch himself staring at Blake's mouth in conversations, thinking, _You'd let me kiss you, wouldn't you? You **want** me to._

Or Avon would simply go mad, jealous of some ridiculous adolescent rival— _no_ , it was better this way.

“Well, all right then,” Blake said.

Blake’s tone had changed. He was livid. He'd never been angry with Avon like _this_ before. Avon didn't know what to _do_ with it, any more than with tears. This from _Blake_ , who smiled if Avon so much as said his name, who worked so hard to please him. Who allowed anyone in Computing to say what they would about Avon, provided it was broadly fair, but who stood up for Avon against people outside the department with fierce loyalty.

“Play dumb if you prefer,” Blake said, the gravity underneath his tone giving Avon to understand that he was quite serious. “Don’t go into your reasons, for fear I’ll talk you out of them. We don't _ever_ have to talk about it, if you won't let me. But,” he managed to give Avon a pleasant, business-like smile, spoilt only by the hardness of his eyes. “I want you to know you did this.”

And Blake slipped away like water.

He wouldn't. He _wouldn't_. Little tart, little _shit_. Avon felt like _breaking_ something. Why weren’t there more breakable objects on this desk? There was only the heavy glass paperweight Blake had picked out for him at Christmas—the swirl of rich color, trapped but strong in the crystal, the only bit of beauty in this gray, grim office tower. A delightful piece of defiance in a gray, grim world. It was technically the office’s communal gift. But only Blake would have thought of it, and Avon couldn’t bring himself.

***

“How was the weekend?” Blake asked brightly, letting himself into Avon's office and taking a seat without preliminaries. Avon was tense. He and Blake had fought on Friday, giving Blake long enough to—

“Mine was all right,” Blake said when Avon didn’t answer in good time. “I took care of that business we discussed.” And from here on out, Avon felt every sentence like a blow. Blake kept his tone casual, and his eyes heavy on Avon, drinking in the effects of his information.

“It was about what I expected it'd be," Blake continued. "She was twenty-two. _She_ wasn't particularly fussed about my age, incidentally. From a different part of the project, actually. Brunette, pale—perhaps you never think of me, but I did have to have something.”

“Please don’t do this to me,” Avon said quietly. He was angry, he was beyond angry. It hurt so much. He’d said he was sorry, how _could_ Blake? Whoring himself out like he was _nothing_. How _dare_ he? Didn’t Blake know what he deserved?

Had it even been _good?_ It should have been good, for him. Avon would have made it _so_ good. He couldn’t bear it. Avon had said he hadn’t wanted that of Blake, but of course it had been his, of _course_ it had, Blake _knew_ that. Merely _suspecting_ that Blake had done it would have wrecked him, but this, this poison, from Blake’s own lips—

Well, fair was fair, _wasn't it_? He'd cheated on Blake with a score of partners. And Blake, at least, had had the decency not to let Avon see him _marked_ by this tryst. Blake must be stronger than he was, or must love him less, to have born _that_ as well as he had.

It should have been _him_. No, _twenty-two_ was too old, but it was better than twenty-seven, and Avon had as good as _told him to do it_. But if this was a step on the path to healing, then Avon thought it would be easier and more pleasant just to die.

  
When Blake said, “I’m sorry,” it was firm. He wasn’t actually sorry for what he’d done––he thought he’d made the right decision––but he wasn’t angry anymore. And he clearly _did_ regret having hurt Avon.

Blake was visibly learning about what his anger did and how to use it. In the midst of desolation Avon felt what was almost a shard of _pride_ in him. Blake was going to be so incredibly talented and strong when he came into himself; he was already remarkable. A remarkable bastard, just now. But even so.

“ _Avon_ ,” Blake said gently, “I know it’s difficult for you, too. But it'd be easier if you'd set a date.”

Blake was still determined to use this strategically. He hadn’t done this to the two of them just to let the deed go to waste. Avon admired and disliked his determination.

“What's the youngest person you'd be prepared to be with?” Blake asked, looking into Avon’s eyes and _making_ Avon look at his with the pressure of his gaze.

“Someone through university,” Avon said flatly. “Preferably someone I _didn’t_ watch grow up.”

“Well, that can’t be helped. So another what, four years then? Three and several months, really. That’s—” Blake exhaled. He didn’t like it, but Blake supposed _that_ couldn’t be helped either. “Well, thanks for setting a time, at last.” Blake smiled, reaching out and taking Avon’s hand where it lay on the desk between them. Only the second time he’d felt the touch of Blake’s hand like this—and Avon hated the hungry way his brain stored away the contact, updating his records, so that later he could imagine Blake’s touch as it was now rather than as it had been when they’d met.

“And I know,” Blake said sweetly, “that because you _promised_ me, you won't go back on it.”

“I said nothing of the kind.” Avon could hear his voice rising sharply. Could feel himself curling his fingers desperately around Blake's.

“Say you don’t want this, and maybe I’ll believe you.” Blake gripped him back. “Say you don’t love me, and maybe I won’t wait for you. But you can’t, can you? And you’ll never be able to. Well _neither will I_. So give us both this instead. Say three years, say five, say _something_.”

Blake was, evidently, less sure of himself than he pretended to be. He papered over his anxiety, his need. He bluffed—his confidence seemed to him a means of winning Avon. And it was.

Twenty-one. And no one touching Blake––no one else––until then. Blake pure, but for everything Avon’s imagination would do to him in the interim. Kept sacrosanct for the purpose.

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re a human child, or something in the shape of one,” Avon said idly, looking at their joined hands, turning Blake’s palm over and running his fingers across it. Watching Blake swallow at the contact. Smiling viciously at that. “Then I think—'no, that’s a lie you tell yourself, to make everything less awful. _Blake_ is just a boy, like any other.' But then I’ve never met a boy like you. Cleverness and precocity are common enough, and relatively unimpressive as these things go. But _you_ —you, my Blake, may well be a sort of charismatic sociopath, capable of talking anyone into anything. What would you like me to do, jump off the roof? I should have done it years ago.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Blake said, an edge of worry in his tone.

“I’m not.” Avon said, running his thumb over Blake’s knuckles. Hands held fast. This, his unconsummated marriage. His untouched bridegroom.

“I couldn’t bear to lose you,” Blake said very earnestly. “Wither thou goest.”

“You monster,” Avon said with a smile and a sick surge of terror at the thought of Blake hurt, clenching Blake's hand violently in his own.

Blake gave him a winsome smile of his own. It sat nicely on his young face. Avon was both relieved to discover he loved Blake more with the passage of time (it implied he was at least interested in _Blake_ , rather than in children qua children) and heartsick. Because time wouldn't ameliorate his concerns, and it felt as though the weight of love in him only grew heavier and harder to bear.

“I’m hardly Machiavelli,” Blake said. “I can't get a man who's been in love with me for years to touch me, or even give me a date when he _might_ be willing to. That’s not exactly a resounding rhetorical victory."

Avon glared at Blake, who even having routed him, seemed not to feel himself sufficiently a conqueror. Blake sighed at his expression.

"Don’t resent me for this. I couldn’t help it either. From the moment I saw you—which is funny, because neither of us believes in love at first sight.”

"No," Avon's expression turned wry, fey. "We do not. 'Behold a god more powerful than I, who, coming, will rule over me. Now your source of joy has been revealed—oh misery, since I will often be troubled from now on.'"

"What's that?"

"Dante."

"Ah. How romantic. Going to write me epics, Kerr?"

"Well," Avon colored at the use of his personal name, "one must do something with oneself."

"But one mustn't do me."

"No."

"Twenty one, then." Blake brought Avon’s hand to his mouth for the briefest press of lips, then let it go.

Avon’s breath had caught at the kiss. "I never told you that," he managed.

"You never told me no," Blake countered.

"I just did."

"Different question."

"My weekend was fine, thank you," Avon said flatly (though he'd spent most of it torturing himself with thoughts of Blake in someone else's arms). "The Barrasta exhibit was disappointing. Poorly framed and crowded, don't bother with it. I've finally managed to produce tolerable mochi." You couldn't buy daifuku anywhere in this dome, and travel permits were a hassle. But Avon had spent his university years in the Hong Kong tower-complex and had developed a taste. He had also spent the weekend in a mood to pound _something_ to a paste, and if it had to be rice, well, so it went.

Blake grinned at him. "Bring me some?"

That positively _spoilt_ way Blake had of asking for a favor, like he just _expected_ Avon to indulge him—Avon could never resist it.

He rolled his eyes to disguise it. "Check your desk."

"A display of affection at _work?_ " Blake arched an eyebrow. "Oh, you must _hate_ me being angry with you."

Avon glowered at him. "They're anonymous, and the box looks quite ordinary."

"You sweetheart."

"Shut up, Blake."

"I love you too."

That was much too much. Avon gave Blake his most severe look. "I meant that no."

Blake gave him a fond look in return, patted him on the arm, and got up to fetch his present from his desk. "I know you meant it. You mean a lot of things."

Avon felt so absurdly better for being back in Blake's good graces. For the promise he hadn't made. For the way Blake had said he loved him, as a joke they both knew wasn’t one.

***

The team had a small office-party in honor of Blake successfully acquiring a perpetual assignment to the division. It had been brought about by a rather difficult bureaucratic maneuver. Doctor Avon, who the team normally considered rather distant, had won popularity by aggressively supporting their favorite, jumping through the hoops required to keep him on.

This, coupled with a few other factors, had rendered the team unusually loyal to their director. He'd become much more of a pleasure to work with, over time—Blake managed him well. Blake was terribly fond of Avon, and Blake's preferences were communicable.

Over the past years the team had also shifted, in disposition and in terms of actual personnel. Blake's initial guide was out. Too administration, too jolly hockey sticks. Blake had complained to Avon privately, and Avon, having his personal opinion confirmed, had shifted her over to Mechanical Engineering, which was a few degrees more sycophantic than Computing.

Avon had protested when Blake had taken against his old school friend Tynus, who had interviewed for a role on the project. Avon had privately accused Blake of jealousy (well _yes_ , he _had_ fucked Tynus, but not since he was Blake's age). But Blake had pointed out that, as an 'old friend', Tynus was more likely than anyone to understand the nature of what _wasn't_ going on between the two of them. Did Avon trust Tynus never to use anything he suspected against him? Blake didn't. Tynus had about him a lean and hungry look.

"That sounds like a quotation," Avon remarked.

"Shakespeare," Blake answered back evenly. " _Julius Caesar_ , to be precise."

"Studying that in school, are you?" Avon asked nastily.

"Don't get shrewish because you know I'm right,” Blake said. “ _Not_ a good look, Avon.” (He _was_ studying the play in school—and he’d rather hoped to impress Avon with his fledgling erudition, lightly worn. How ridiculous and _stupid_ he must look to Avon sometimes. He _hated_ it.)

Resentful but chastened, Avon deferred, selecting a different candidate. Tynus was likely to get Avon into trouble in ways unrelated to Blake, as well. In university they'd done something not-quite-legal together. Hong Kong was an expensive city. But Blake didn't know that, and Avon wasn't going to tell him. Let Blake think Avon had always been a model of prudence—it would give him less license. Blake had more than enough chutzpah as it was.

Fortunately the rest of their division was rather more circumspect. They aligned with Blake and Avon’s sensibilities, but Owomo and Lin and the rest weren't overtly political. Or if they were, they hadn’t mentioned it. It wasn't the sort of thing you talked about in the office, if you weren't an obvious plant. Yet the Computing team members were all too good at what they did not to find the administration frustrating, and sometimes indicated as much. Owomo in particular had no fear, and flatly said they'd get on a sight better if they weren't all drugged—they'd never pulled this shit in the Nigerian domes. She hadn't asked to be re-allocated.

Tamora tried to shut her up. The department probably wasn't bugged, but someone could walk by.

"What," Owomo snorted, "is someone going to listen to an old black woman? That'll be the fucking day."

Blake decidedly encouraged the anti-authoritarian atmosphere. He agreed with his co-workers’ pragmatic complaints, and his family was political (which, thankfully, hadn't come up in his permanent allocation hearing). He came back from a vacation of a few months' duration, having visited an exiled uncle and cousin on a prison planet, with rather more fixed convictions than he'd left with.

The team thought it was sweet, how visibly pleased Doctor Avon was to have Blake back. And how he tried to play it down. And how bad he was at that.

"I don't think the Federation _should_ have access to teleportation technology," Blake told Avon privately after his return. “I don’t think I really understood the military implications, before I spent time in space. The applications division only ever talked to _us_ about shipping and cutting down on shuttle manufacture, not boarding parties and hyper-mobile security forces.”

They were having coffee together, alone, quite off the beaten track. Avon saw less point in denying Blake, now. And Blake had been away three months, and his return had been like the coming of spring (though it was midwinter and they were far from seasons, living under glass).

Avon’s lip quirked. "Fortunately for your scruples, they don't look likely to. Aquitar is going to be another Radical Terraforming. Our people won't be implicated— _it_ will fail, rather than _us_."

"It needn’t be. With the right people, undrugged, I think we _could_ crack it. Computing does well, since you got us classed Lightest Need." This too had been a boost to Avon's workplace popularity. Human Resources had grudgingly admitted, in the face of Avon’s crisply argued case, that all of Computing, not just the top administrators and the department’s lone growing child, needed to be able to think properly, and that as elite workers on a prestigious project like this, his people were very grateful to the state and hardly represented a security risk. Surely the lowest dosage bracket would suffice? Owomo, delighted to be almost as free of suppressants as she’d been back home, had pinched his cheek and lived to tell the tale.

"It's the interdepartmental model at fault, not any one department," Avon observed, turning his mug with an idle hand. "The security protocols that mean I can’t _speak_ to anyone from Long-Term Planning without a permit, let alone share records without a deep-vet. The question, for Human Resources, is always ‘why’ rather than ‘why not’. Besides, that string of experiments last year was more promising than anything else we've done. But,” Avon smiled wryly, “we moved away from that line of inquiry because Reisfield is out of political and intellectual favor, whereas this batch is the brainchild of their new favorite."

Blake blinked at him. "What, _really?_ "

Avon laughed. "And you claim you're not naïve." Not that he wanted anything to beat the naïveté and idealism out of Blake. It would be such a loss—the pointless destruction of a beautiful thing, which at times showed its own wisdom. Besides, he could provide whatever cynicism Blake's approach lacked, assuming they stayed close to one another. And he wanted to always be near Blake, able to protect him (and this way, he knew, lay justification and danger).

"It's just—" Blake leaned back in his chair. "Do you sometimes find it difficult to believe that things happen so _stupidly?_ That everything's arranged so against even the best interests of the power-brokers? They _do_ want the teleport, but they can't dismantle their own systemic nonsense to, and without that they can’t achieve their ends."

"That is life, Blake."

Blake rolled his eyes at being patronized. "To a degree, I'll grant you. But this is an insane system, and it doesn’t need to be."

"People before you have tried and failed to reform it."

"Perhaps reforming it isn't good enough."

"You could move off world." Avon raised an eyebrow at him. _Careful_ , it warned––even here, in the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t wise to talk about more radical solutions. Though leaving wouldn’t be easy. The Federation didn’t let someone as promising as Blake go willingly.

"We could," Blake both agreed and corrected him, "when I'm older. Though it'll be tough with your priority clearance, and our leaving won't help anyone else."

"And you want to help anyone else."

"No, I want to leave Owomo and Lin and Tamora, and my family on that awful little planet, and everyone like them and worse off, to rot, what do you think?"

“Cheating the system yourself would be a difficult feat. But it seems that’s not enough for you,” Avon said sardonically.

"No, it isn't," Blake agreed, challenge in his eyes. "Lightest Need's not good enough, either. I was off the drugs for months—it felt a little like the times you let me touch you. I saw Earth from space—it's still blue and brown and green. I even walked around outside, on the planet I visited—have you ever done that?" Blake asked with genuine curiosity and a trace of wonder, with an evident desire that Avon too should have had the pleasure.

"A few times," Avon admitted, a little undone by how lovely Blake was. Though it wouldn’t do to let it show—like touching him, bless Blake. How sentimental. How frankly wonderful. "In Hong Kong you can pay the guards—I saw the ocean."

"Did you really?" Blake said with a little awe.

Avon smiled. "It has this—scent. Like salt-tablets. Don't make too much of this—a little like sex."

"Like life, I suppose."

"Yes, that's just it. I sat in front of it for hours—the sound is hypnotic. The tide crept in and in until it touched me, and I realized I could go _into_ it, if I wanted to. I don't care for the public lidos, but this was quite different."

"We should live by the ocean," Blake said.

"Oh, you'd have to have rather a lot of money, to pull that off," Avon reminded him with a peculiar grin.

  
Blake studied him. "Are you working on something, Avon?"

"Not precisely," Avon said. "I've just noticed something interesting. A little window one might crawl through. And I've made a few inquiries." He sipped his coffee. "One doesn't want to work on state projects and Lightest Need category suppressants forever."

"No, one does not," Blake agreed. "No one should."

"You're wasted on them, certainly."

Intrepid, canny Blake watched his pretty mouth anywhere there might be ears and was deliciously seditious, politically and personally, when they were alone together. Earth stunted Blake, held him back like Avon had feared _he_ would. Blake was too big for this world––he needed scope.

Avon would have to find him a better one. It wasn’t enough for Avon that Blake simply survive the world (which no one managed to do forever, be they rich as Croesus).

That wasn't a promise, even in his head. Avon wasn’t planning for them to run off together, or even planning to do Blake a personal favor, per se. It was just that Blake would do better, on Lindor or Teal, or in Freedom City, if they were feeling gauche and obvious (was an apartment on each gauche and obvious? _Not_ that they'd be sharing one or multiple apartments—but surely there was some safe way for Avon to watch Blake enjoy the marks of his esteem—using binoculars from his own penthouse, perhaps.).

"I'll update you, if anything comes of it," Avon told him.

Which of them was putting dangerous thoughts into the other's head? Avon never knew. But he would keep the time-scale in proportion. He wouldn't leave without Blake, and Blake had to get through university before he'd be allowed another travel visa. Besides, Blake had a family who would be questioned roughly if he disappeared. A family, Avon knew, that was actively seeking to acquire emigration permits to a frontier colony (and from there, one might just slip away). Legitimate documents could be arranged, given time. It was something to consider.

Meanwhile Blake was looking at the clever, daring, handsome man who refused to allow himself to run away with the man he was in love with. Who prized Blake's autonomy like a dragon did its horde. Who was getting more comfortable with himself and Blake with the years—more playful, more thoughtful, more daring, more assured. Sexier, to Blake’s thinking.

"I missed you," Blake said.

Avon changed the subject with a charming grin, beginning a merciless deconstruction of the public programming Blake had missed, and Blake understood that this had been stored up for him. It was 'I missed you too', in deed if not in words.

***

Agent Bartholomew composed a dismissive report on Kerr Avon after two weeks' investigation. Yes, he had made a few enquiries about the banking system that looked suspicious, but they had detected no further activity along those lines since. It was possible he was sensibly wary, and thus being circumspect, but her inquiries (the standard effort to push suspected dissidents, accelerate their plans and entrap them) hadn't revealed much in that line. Avon seemed as apolitical as his psych profile (taken when he'd joined Aquitar) indicated, and highly enmeshed in his work—a contra-indicator for standard apolitical fraud and the like.

Bartholomew was a bit piqued, actually. She hadn’t gotten very far with him. It was always difficult when the subject's attentions were engaged elsewhere. Kerr Avon's attentions appeared to be long-wedded and celebrating a diamond anniversary elsewhere. She'd gotten blunter, he'd gotten suspicious and still more cautious. Bartholomew’s report indicated that Doctor Avon was furtive because, from what she could gather, he was erotically enthralled with the apprentice assigned to his department. He appeared to be doing nothing about it, but his psych profile had 'obsessive tendencies' and 'guilt complex' written in huge letters all over it. Ergo he skulked about the world looking like a criminal because of some boy he wasn't fucking.

It wasn't illegal, Bartholomew’s report pointed out. And he wasn't even doing it—just, it seemed, thinking about it constantly. Bartholomew suspected it was even making both him and the Blake boy better employees. The boy hero-worshiped Avon and worked notably hard for him, while Avon paid more attention to his work than would otherwise have been likely. He’d also recently turned down a more lucrative offer from the private sector, presumably because it wouldn't come with his pet. Left alone to pine tragically, they would probably continue to increase one another's performance indices.

A pity—Bartholomew had liked the look of Doctor Avon, and of that cute proclivity to monomania in his profile. The neurotic ones were either awful or desperately, flatteringly intense in bed, and he'd looked like the latter. She’d had enough of them to judge. She hadn't minded the idea of undercover work.

Bartholomew didn't have access to the under-18s psych profiles. That was a different division. She tried later, at her demotional hearing, to point out that she _couldn't_ have known what Blake was and what he'd be capable of getting Avon to do for him. But the axe was going to fall on someone, because the Federation wasn't as interested in fixing problems as it was in lavishly assigning blame for them. That someone was apparently going to be Bartholomew, knocked back hard for want of a more open mainframe.

***

Flushed with two drinks and good cheer, Roj Blake bounded into the bathroom and stopped short. Hunched over the sink, staring at his own reflection as though he didn't much like the look of it, was Avon. Avon, whom Blake had invited to come to the work-drinks in honor of his birthday. Avon whom he'd _asked_ to come. Avon who had, apparently, made it as far as the pub itself—had perhaps watched the table full of his co-workers for a moment, watched Blake—before veering off into the bathroom to grip the lip of the counter-top.

That wretched expression. _God,_ Avon made everything hard on himself.

Avon caught sight of Blake's guarded, sympathetic face in the mirror and gave it a wry smile, pulling himself to rights as though Blake hadn't seen him looking wrecked. Perhaps he didn't know how bad it had been. Perhaps he hoped to bluff it out.

"I’m not—feeling well,” Avon explained. Such a thin lie—or if he truly wasn’t, the problem wasn’t illness. “Happy birthday, Blake."

Blake stepped forward, putting his hand's on Avon's shoulders, leaning into his back a little. Avon shuddered and closed his eyes. "Don't."

"All right." Blake stepped back.

Avon straightened and turned and opened his mouth to say something, but Blake was standing very close and staring at him, his expression tender. They were the same height now. They hadn't used to be. Blake innocently wetted his dry lips, and Avon made a desperate sound and shoved Blake into the stall behind him, slamming the door shut after him with his palm. Blake wasn't slow on the uptake—he grabbed Avon's jacket (nice—he'd _dressed_ for this) and pulled Avon to him, wrapped a hand around the back of Avon's neck and brought their mouths together. Then Blake held himself still and closed his eyes as Avon pushed into his mouth, teaching him how to kiss. Blake made a thready, needy sound—he hadn't known he'd like kissing this much (his strategic loss of virginity had included barely any). He _loved_ kissing, he loved _kissing Avon_ , finally _getting_ to, and in answer to the sound Avon shivered under his hands, breaking away to gasp into his mouth. (Quietly, it was all done quietly, this was a public bathroom, anyone might—)

Blake––afraid that any pause would give Avon time to recover his judgment and push him away, that Avon might run––pulled him back urgently.

"Don't stop," he whispered, suspecting Avon would like it. "Avon, love—" Avon whimpered into his mouth. " _Please_ don't—"

They kissed until Blake was hard, drunk on it, hardly even thinking of wanting anything more. Blake could feel Avon was hard against him too, almost as responsive as himself, though only one of them was a desperate eighteen-year old. There—indisposed like this, he wouldn't go. Blake relaxed the tight hold he had on Avon's neck, and Avon slid away from Blake's mouth to suck his throat. Blake hissed appreciatively, thinking, _Please oh please leave a mark_.

"Is this my present?" Blake asked, running his hand through Avon's hair like he'd always wanted to.

"It isn't much of one," Avon said.

"Give me another, then," Blake suggested, sliding to his knees, maintaining eye-contact, because if he dropped it, the spell might break. Avon would lose that rapt, caught expression and think 'What the _hell_ am I doing?' and not _let_ him—

Blake palmed Avon's erection through what Blake knew very well to be Avon's best trousers, and Avon shut his eyes. His head thunked back audibly against the wall of the stall, and he trailed unsteady fingers over Blake’s cheek. Very deliberately, Blake pulled down the tab of the zip. Wet his lips. Looked up at Avon, who was breathing hard, chest going like bellows. Blake had never done this before and he was nervous, but he wanted it so badly, almost couldn’t process that he’d felt Avon’s cock through cloth, that Avon had actually _touched_ him—if he were clumsy, Avon would forgive that, would show him what to do.

“ _Blake,_ ” Avon whispered harshly, and Blake knew, always knew, he was loved and loved well, but now it clenched his chest into a knot. Only Avon could say his name like it was another word for ‘beloved’.

Blake swallowed. He reached out his hand.

Avon caught Blake's wrist before Blake could touch him. Avon stared at his own hand in a daze, putting together why he’d done that. What reflex action of decency had prevented him from letting the mouth he adored nuzzle sweetly at his cock.

"We're in a bathroom stall," Avon said, as if confused.

" _Anywhere_ ," Blake said roughly, bringing up his other hand. Avon caught that too, and gently pushed Blake back by the wrists. Zipped himself up hastily and barged out of the stall, out through the pub's back door (next to the loos, no one saw him go), into the alley. Blake followed close behind, having clambered to his feet when Avon had charged out.

Avon sucked in the cool night air through his teeth, then laughed unpleasantly. A touch hysterically.

Blake moved to touch him, but Avon held out a hand, silently telling him to stay where he was. Blake thought about taking it in his own, kissing the palm, and watching Avon shudder like that again—but Avon wanted not to be touched, and Blake wanted Avon to be happy. Blake was fairly sure he’d been _about_ to make Avon very happy indeed, but if Avon didn’t _want_ to be happy, then—

Blake took a few steadying breaths. “Are you all right?” he asked Avon, observing his tight, clenched shoulders. The way Avon had brought his arms up around his torso, wrapping them around himself almost protectively.

Avon laughed properly at that. “Am _I_ all right? No. But then that is hardly new, and I can hardly blame you for it.” Avon paused a moment, and when he began to speak again his tone was more caustic. “I nearly made you suck me off in a fucking bathroom stall, and you are asking me _how I feel_.”

For god’s sake, Avon thought to himself in an agony of self disgust, Blake’s first time sucking a man off should be a secure, instructive, if at all possible romantic experience. It should, at the very _least,_ take place in a god-dammed bedroom. (A part of Avon’s brain insisted that the only correct element of the staging had been the players).

“You didn’t ‘make’ me do anything,” Blake said, eyes narrowing. “And from my perspective, it’s the ‘nearly’ that’s the problem.”

“When a sober adult pulls an inexperienced eighteen-year old who’s been drinking, it is hardly a model of—”

“Oh give it a rest,” Blake hissed, hurt. “If you won’t let me have you,” and his fingers clenched in his palm, because he was still half-hard and still half-breathed the smell of Avon, good cologne and heady sex, still half-felt the soft stroke of Avon’s fingers on his face, “then at least don’t insult me. I’m not some liquored-up ingénue you took advantage of, and I’ll kiss you in any state you like to prove it. You can stop mentally chastising yourself on that score, as well. You _stopped_ me,” Blake said with a hint of bitterness. “And if you _hadn’t_ , two soma and lemonades wouldn’t make you a rapist. Having known me as a child doesn’t make you—”

“Going to say the word, Blake?” Avon asked, smiling coldly. “The one we so studiously avoid? No, I suppose having _known_ you as a child doesn’t make me that. What about having wanted you? Oh,” he laughed awfully, “you _know_ how I wanted you.”

“You fell in love,” Blake said with an exhalation of breath, pity and frustration mingling in him. “You couldn’t help it. I don’t know how we understood one another from the beginning, but I can’t regret it. You could have had me the day we met, and you know _that_. But you didn’t. _I_ don’t know that it would have been a bad idea, but you made a moral decision and you lived by it. I can respect your probity,” Blake gave the word a gently mocking spin, “even if it’s tormented me. You wanted to wait for me to be an adult, and now here we are. My eighteenth. You already agreed to see this through—we don’t need to wait another three years, what’s the _point?_ ”

“The _point_ , my darling Blake,” Avon said, his most sarcastic tone inadequately disguising the simple truth of the endearment, “is that you can have no idea what you want.”

“ _God,_ you’re a paternalistic arse sometimes.” Blake crossed his arms over his own chest, warding off the chill evening air and hurt.  

Avon sneered. “What a good word for it—I’m far too much of a father to you to get to touch you like that.”

“You're nothing like. Are you _ever_ going to forget that you knew me when I was young and stupid? I'm an adult _now_. I _love you._ ” Blake caught his gaze and made Avon look at him when he said it. Avon visibly flinched, but recovered. "Doesn't that matter to you?" Blake said, almost pleaded. "Doesn't it matter more than my age?"

Avon summoned up a protective, distancing coldness—his only weapon against Blake's raw vulnerability. “You were never stupid, Blake. That is a key component of the problem. You were clever enough to catch and reflect the fact that I wanted you. Flattered, I think, by adult attention. You shaped yourself around it, and you performed wanting _me_ perfectly. But you don’t perfectly understand yourself, and you never will, where I am concerned. This is wrong, Blake, if anything is. It will _always_ be wrong.”

Blake shook his head, his eyes over-bright. “It’ll be a _joke_ when I’m thirty and you’re forty, you and I will _laugh_ about this. If you never intend to see this through, if you push me away, you’ll regret it 'til the day you die, Avon. And so will I.”

“There are worse things than regret," Avon said, soft and certain. "It’s a part of life.”

“Like what, hurting me by having me? You think that's worse than regretting what might have been? Not for me, Avon, and not for you either, I promise you.”

“If you entered a relationship now, you’d become or remain what I needed you to be—you’d feel honor-bound to uphold a commitment. Not to drop me, after all this. Consider that you might outpace me, Blake—you’re growing and changing in ways I don’t entirely align with. You’re more political now than you used to be."

"And you resent that?" Blake asked, his eyes narrow.

"No," Avon said harshly. "Other than the fact that it may drive you to do something unwise. It's what _you_ value, therefore it’s just what you should do—the point is merely illustrative. You've matured since you decided on this, and your preferences have changed. They will continue to evolve.”

“I decided on you," Blake said levelly. "There isn't any 'this'. You’ve grown too, you idiot. You’re not twenty-five anymore, or so awkward no one on the project wants to have a conversation with you. You have no faith in yourself. I wish you’d take some of mine. If you could see you like I see you—" Blake shook his head. That was never going to happen. Avon _needed him_ , no matter what he thought. He needed Blake's trust and support, Blake's unshakable belief in his abilities and better qualities. He needed all the things Blake couldn’t help giving him, unstintingly. "So we’ll grow up together, it’s what people do. You’re twenty-eight, you’re not _done_ yet.”

“What if you wanted someone else?” Avon insisted. “What if you wanted to _be_ someone else?" Blake opened his mouth to say there wasn't anyone but Avon for him, there never could be, he didn't want to be any version of himself that wasn't Avon's, but Avon pressed on. "Or, if you lack all self-preservation, do you know what it would do to _me_ to know I’d hurt you irreparably, or to suspect that you were only mine out of _habit_ , or a childish preference?”

“You think I just want ‘an older man’? You think when I saw you, I thought ‘oh he must be clever, he’s handsome, I’ll cultivate a crush, shall I?’ _Habit?_ Every fucking _day_ I fall in love with you, like it's brand new, worse than ever—oh what's the _point?_ ” Blake huffed, throwing a hand in the air. “You’re never going to believe me when I say I want _you_. That I’ll want you in three years, in thirty. There’s no sense in talking it out, because you don’t trust me.”

“Of course I trust you,” Avon corrected him, because that couldn’t stand. “That is never in question. Things possibly beyond your control, I doubt. Never you.”

Blake’s eyes softened at that. “I do know.” It was hard to stay thoroughly annoyed with Avon when Avon was essentially reminding Blake how much he respected and loved him—was insisting on the point.

“Good,” Avon said. It was important to him that Blake understood his worth—knew he was worthy of trust, and that Avon had it in him.

“I’ll just have to want you according to a schedule.” Blake gave him a fond glare. “Maybe you’ll get it when you’re ninety.”

Blake seemed to have found his unshakable conviction again. Avon found it frightening, reassuring and arousing in turns—it put him back on his guard.

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Avon smiled thinly.

Blake regarded him levelly. “Yes, we will.” He ran a hand through his hair, mood turning to something less grim.

“I don’t suppose you’d go in for half-measures?” he asked dryly. “Not willing to hold me while I bring myself off, or anything like that? Just you watching me while I did it would be fairly good. I love the way you look at me. It’s what I think about, half the time.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Avon said sharply, his throat working, his face pale.

Blake shrugged, the gesture more casual than he felt by miles. "No, I didn't think so. But it's—” he made a face as he picked his next words carefully, given that 'hard' wouldn’t really do, "not easy. And I can’t help but feel we waste the time. And your quaint honor turn to dust,” he waved his hand, compressing the argument into a line, a neat synecdoche.

“And into ashes all your lust,” Avon mocked back, echoing his earlier conviction of Blake’s mutability.

“Not that again, we said we’d see. By which I mean _you’ll_ see. My lust, by the by, is a serious matter. Don’t be cavalier.”

“That’s _awful_ , and you started it.”

“I’d have finished it, if you’d let me,” Blake said with a self-deprecating grin. “Can we manage it, then?” He waved a hand back in the direction of the pub. “Drinks with the lot of them?”

Avon’s lip quirked. “Just about. I hate these things. Why _did_ I indulge you?”

Blake smirked. “Because you generally indulge me, unless you’ve managed to convince yourself that _not_ indulging me will keep me safe.” Avon looked distinctly embarrassed by that, which Blake wasn’t unhappy with. “They’ll have sent out a search party for me at this point.” Blake jerked his head back towards the interior, which contained their co-workers. “I’ll head back. You follow—”

“—in ten minutes,” Avon agreed with a nod. He’d circle the pub, and come back in around the front. There would be no reason for anyone to think that the two of them had been out here together.

“Avon?” Blake said from the back door, turning to look at him.

Avon raised an eyebrow.

“Thank you for my present. It was what I wanted.”

And he left Avon to rub his face with his hand in a gritty back-alley, annoyed at how Blake’s bursts of sentimentality could smote him, when they hadn’t any business being anything but ludicrous.

***

"No," Avon slurred at the Christmas party a few months later, "not— _Anyone_ but Blake."

Owomo rolled her eyes. "Your drunk arse needs to get home somehow, Director, and I'm not taking you."

"But—" Avon tried feebly.

"Give him here," Blake said, and Owomo gently shoved Avon over and went back to the party.

"Relax," Blake said quietly to him. "I swear I'll respect your virtue, if it means that much to you. And I know it does." He rolled his eyes.

Something unholy lit in Avon's drink-muddled eyes. "Do you promise me, Blake?"

Blake sighed. "You really can't hold your liquor, can you? What was in that punch?"

" _Blake_ ," Avon whispered against his cheek.

Blake swallowed. "All _right_. Yes, Avon. I promise."

"Good," Avon smiled. "Take me home, Blake." He laughed, pressing himself into Blake a little. "Get me into bed."

Blake stiffened. "Are you going to be awful about this?"

Avon grinned. "No more than you always are."

"Oh _good_."

Blake called them a transport, and Avon rattled his address into the computer. Blake manned the transport when it came, handling the control, and Avon laid a hand casually on Blake's knee. Squeezed it. Watched Blake swallow. Kept his hand there. Then ran it idly up and down Blake's thigh. Not too close to his cock—which he watched swelling through Blake's trousers under his attentions.

"Stop that," Blake muttered, darting a glance over at him.

Avon smiled beatifically at him. "Stop what?" Fingers swirling idly, drawing patterns. Blake was properly hard now, and Avon licked his lips. Let Blake watch him do it.

Avon had noticed, at Blake's eighteenth, the surprising bulk of the erection pressed against his own thigh. Blake _had_ grown up nicely. When he’d thought, before, about fucking proper (fairly frequently, in other words), Avon had usually thought about fucking Blake. But after that incident, Blake fucking him brutally with that long, thick cock had started to figure more regularly in his fantasies. No finesse—Blake should punish Avon for wanting him. Blake should fuck him to pieces. Avon knew he deserved it. He wanted to gasp under the blows, wanted Blake to use him for his own satisfaction, wanted to suffer for this.

Of course he'd never let it happen. But at _this_ moment, his chastity was Blake's problem, for once. And he could look at Blake with sex blatant in his eyes, and _Blake_ could rip himself apart resisting it. See how _he_ liked it.

After another mile the melancholy phase of drunkenness kicked in, and Avon lost himself in the morose circle of thoughts that he'd drunk too much punch to escape in the first place. The new fear he’d been entertaining was the same as his old fear—the difference in their ages. And yet it also represented a fresh complication. Of late, now that Blake was enrolled in university and his life seemed to have sped up exponentially, Avon was _terrified_ that Blake would outgrow him. He was convinced he was truly in love, whereas Blake was an infatuated teen who would, in time, discover he didn't care about or for Avon, who already felt he had to struggle to keep pace with Blake.

"What are you thinking?" Blake asked, darting a curious glance at him. Avon’s hand sat idle on Blake’s knee now, the teasing caresses having drawn to a close.

"I am thinking––‘What does it say about me,’" Avon responded with too much drunken frankness, "‘that I sometimes feel as though I’m running to keep up with someone ten years my junior?’"

"From the way your fingers were slipping across my inner thigh a moment ago, I have to admit, I hoped for better things,” Blake said, a little genuinely disappointed. “You could Humbert Humbert harder, love. What does it _say,_ " he mused. "I don't know. Perhaps that you’re obsessed with proving yourself. That you're always striving to winnow out what you believe in and live up to it, and as such will always be a challenging partner. That, in part, you’re why I value those forms of integrity, those ways of interacting with the world. That I’m lucky to have found you, no matter when I did it."

"The worst thing about you," Avon said with consideration, "isn't actually your age. It's that I'm not the man you think I am, and you make me wish I were."

"Well," Blake said brightly, "do and be better, if it bothers you. Though I don't think you have much to worry about. You have good principles, and you largely live by them. Sometimes you want a bit of _reminding_ , but so does anyone. Here we are, then. Virtue intact." Blake got Avon to the door of his apartment, and stayed outside.

"Not coming in?" Avon suggested, making the invitation blatant.

"Is it that annoying when I do it?" Blake asked.

Avon smiled at him, seductive and vicious. "Worse." A little thrill ran up his spine. Blake could have him tonight. Avon wanted it badly. He wouldn't even resent Blake for taking advantage of him.

Blake swallowed. "I'll remember that. You don't need any help from here. Goodnight, Avon."

"Kiss me," Avon said suddenly. Blake froze. "Please," Avon continued, "just—"

Carefully, Blake wrapped his arms around Avon. Almost reverently, he kissed Avon's cheek and forehead—a conscious echo of the first time they'd kissed, when Blake had been seventeen. A reminder of what Avon had, in sobriety, been willing to give _him_.

"More," Avon breathed, pressing against him, seeking Blake’s mouth with his own, clutching Blake’s arm with desperate fingers. "Blake I need you—Like this, I _could_ — _More._ "

"Ask me tomorrow," Blake murmured, turning and going, taking the stairs to avoid having to wait for the lift, and thus giving himself any time to reconsider.

***

Blake sat in the police station, glaring stolidly at the officer who was booking him. Outside, sirens and the shouts of dispersing student protesters continued to clamor—but things were wrapping up. The demonstration had made its point, for whatever good it would do.

"Well Mister Blake, were you one of the leaders of this rabble?" the inspector asked, looking up from examining Blake's wallet.

Blake leaned back in his chair, propping his chin on his knitted hands. "Who says a free association of people dissatisfied with compulsory education assignment _needs_ a leader?"

"Need or no, there are always a few trouble-makers better organized than the rest. Someone put all this together. It’s my job to find the ring-leaders." The officer looked up, raising an eyebrow at him. "Your work card says Aquitar." 

Blake tensed, for the first time since he’d been brought in. "That's right."

"Bit of a high-profile project, that. Now why would someone assigned a plum job like Aquitar feel badly used by the state?"

"Why indeed," Blake deadpanned. "After all, the labor exploitation looks so good on my CV. It may even lead to fruitful decades of being taken advantage of and made to work on military projects against my will. _Lucky_ me."

"You're a stroppy one." The inspector shook his head. "You know you Alphas do better than the rest of us. Mustn't grumble."

"I know," Blake agreed. "And I'm sorry about that. I'd be happy to talk about your position, if you like. I'm interested. What do _you_ want, Officer Parkim? Did you get to choose your job?"  

Officer Parkim regarded him evenly.

“Bit obviously manipulative.”

Blake shrugged. “So’s the administration. I’m not trying for subtlety, I’m just telling you what you already know. And I _do_ want to know about your job assignment, believe it or not. The problems aren’t unconnected.”

"As a matter of fact, no. Though most of us in my grade do—it's your lot that get assigned carefully. They don't bother quite so much about the likes of us."

Blake took his lumps, Parkim gave him that. Determined and decently good-humored, even as he was being arrested. He seemed all right. Well-intentioned, plenty of pluck. Young, probably confused.

Parkim would hate to book him. Parkim might not even have to, if he could pull a string or two—and Blake had strings Parkim could pull.

"Look," Inspector Parkim said, "I'm going to call your boss at Aquitar. Get a character reference."

Blake's eyes widened. "Please don't. There's no need for that. I'm happy to take the mark on my record—" 

"It's not really up to you, is it?" Parkim said with a shrug, taking out his communicator and getting connected. He'd determined to do Blake a favor, and Blake was just going to have to put up with it.

Blake listened to the one-sided conversation with his head in his hands. 

Twenty minutes later, Avon was charging into the station. Blake happened to know he must have left a very late departmental meeting to do it, and wondered what excuse he'd given. 

"Thanks for coming down, sir," Officer Parkim said. 

Avon looked _livid_ , but perhaps you had to know him to understand that. He didn't so much as glance at Blake, simply took the seat Parkim proffered and addressed the inspector with polite authority. 

"Thank you for alerting me. Blake is one of our most talented engineers. It appears he's also made a stupid, childish mistake. The other Aquitar directors and I would would be greatly displeased if there were complications here. Needless to say, this has been some sort of misunderstanding.” Parkim nodded, and Avon continued. “Blake won't do anything like this again, I can assure you."

"Glad to hear it, sir," Parkim said, casting a dubious look over at Blake's sullen expression. "Have you told him that?"

"Oh," Avon said through a particularly unpleasant smile, "I shouldn't worry about that, Officer. By the time I'm through with Blake, he'll be inescapably clear on the point. I am going to impress it on him. With a branding iron, if necessary. There will be no repeat of this incident. Will that be all?"

Parkim nodded. "At present. Though Roj—bear in mind your boss here's doing you a favor. There won't always be someone who cares about you around to bail you out. Learn to keep your head down, eh?"

Blake's looked peculiarly humiliated. 

"Thank you for contacting me about this," Avon said to Parkim.

"No problem, sir. Didn't have to come yourself, you know."

"I wanted to ensure that this was dealt with directly, and that we understood one another about the matter of his record. Get your coat, Blake," Avon snapped, still not looking at him. Blake didn't get up instantly, and Avon grabbed his arm, like he was going to haul him up out of the chair and then out of the station by the ear.

Blake shook him off. "Excuse me a moment, Officer—what about the others?" 

" _Blake_ ," his boss hissed, looking him in the face at last. 

Blake didn't answer him. Instead, he regarded Parkim with that steady, fixed gaze. 

Parkim sighed. "Warnings all around—they're Alpha students, and no previous offenders in this batch. They'll be released in the morning."

"If they’re being held, I want to stay with them."

"Out of the question," Avon said.

"I mean it," Blake said, still looking at Parkim. "I'm not going if they don't. Give me a warning, too. Whatever you need to do. I was part of it, and I'm not dodging punishment while people I acted with suffer."

 _Definitely_ one of the ring-leaders, Parkim concluded. Not that he'd greatly doubted it. The charisma was something of a give-away.

"Going by the look on his face, your boss doesn't seem to agree with you. And he has more pull than either of us. Look Roj, I'm not going to let you back in, but you can bear the good news—tell them I'm going light with this one. Check they're all right for yourself. _That_ ," he said in response to Blake's opening mouth, "is all I'm prepared to allow."

"Take it, Blake," Avon commanded, and Blake shot him an annoyed look, not insubordinate but not duly deferential.

They must be close, Parkim thought, Director Avon's coldness notwithstanding. Blake was embarrassed to be shown up in front of him. Aquitar HQ was across the Dome––Doctor Avon must have come running. Immaterial, but it was the sort of thing Parkim was in the habit of noticing. Doctor Avon was trying to protect him. Maybe Blake inspired that sort of thing. Hell, _he_ wanted to go easy on Blake, even though he suspected the boy would only get up to more trouble, if given an inch. 

Blake exhaled. "All right. I'll go and see them. Thank you," he said, a little ironically. "'God works wonders now and then; Behold a copper, an honest man.'"

Parkim shrugged. "Just doing my job."

"Would it were a better one," Blake said with a rueful grin. Well, fair enough. Parkim didn't rejoice in some of the things he'd had to do over the course of his career, and a few of them kept him up nights. Wouldn't be so bad if Blake's people had made their point. They had one to make. What the hell was Blake doing assigned to an engineering degree rather than politics, which was so blatantly his first, best destiny? For that matter, what were half the brutes he had to manage doing assigned here, when men like them had no business being trusted with weapons and power over people? It had only been a demo, nothing violent in it. Had to break it up—policy was policy, and Parkim knew what his job and life were worth—but still. Honest, eh? Gave him a sort of wistful feeling.

"Would it were a better world," Parkim said with a reluctant bit of a grin. "Off you get, Jons will take you."

***

"Just you _wait_ until I am through with you," Avon whispered to Blake with a kind of furious, menacing relish.

Blake was spared the necessity of response (he was leaning towards 'Is that a promise?' but the guard was _right there_ ) by their arrival at the cells.

"Roj!" Mari Lopez shouted. People started to stir and look up. Avon hung back with the guard.

"We thought they were beating you," Dav Reynol said frankly. Mari and Dav had been his co-organizers in the action (the police must have suspected as much—they were alone, and everyone else who’d been brought in was in a cell behind them, which Blake couldn’t get over to from this side), and Mari was Freedom Party—had inducted Blake in.

"No such luck," Blake said dryly. "Right, here's the situation.” He raised his voice so the people in the far cell could hear too. “Warnings, I'm afraid, and an overnight. They've cleared me, so they're not letting me stay—"

"Why would you want to?" Mari asked with a snort. "Don't take solidarity too far—there won't be enough pillows to go 'round as it is."

"Worst sleepover ever," Dav agreed, though it was clear the levity was forced. None of them had ever had a run in with the law like this before. They knew getting a warning wasn't damning, but neither was it fantastic. They were all a little scared. 

"I think your inspector's on the level, for what it's worth. Meet me tomorrow? Let me know you're all right."

There were some grunts of agreement, and the people in the further cell started talking amongst themselves. Unfortunately, Dav spotted Avon lingering sourly in the doorway. 

"Well well—who's that?"

"A friend," Blake said tightly.

"Why Blake," Dav purred, "that's never himself."

"Shut it, Dav," Blake growled, even as Avon's gaze sharpened curiously.

"Himself?" Mari asked.

"The reason Blake doesn't date anyone," Dav clarified. "The person for whom he turns down all other offers. The mysterious fiancé, of whom we have heard so _little_. Well, Blake?" Blake didn't respond. He could feel himself going red in the face. "Oh _that's_ damning," Dav chuckled. 

" _The_ fiancé? No way." Mari shook her head, trying to get a better look at Avon. "He's way too old for Blake, maybe it's his dad— _Oh_ ," she said in a taken-aback voice, feeling the laser focus of Avon's absolutely vitriolic stare even from several yards back. "Oh no, shit, it _is_ the fiancé."

Blake coughed. "We'll just be … going. Now. He's not—particularly happy with me, at present."

" _That_ is an understatement," Avon said quite clearly.

"Not bad though," Mari muttered quietly. "When I said 'dad' I meant like, a _hot_ dad—"

"Shut _up,_ " Blake said through clenched teeth.

"Blake, you are done here," Avon said, striding out. He snapped his fingers in the doorway and then passed into the corridor, without looking behind him. Blake, embarrassed at that display (Mari and Dav wouldn't let him hear the end of it in a hurry), followed him.

"Right," Blake said when they were ensconced alone together in a personal transport, "I know how angry you are—"

"You cannot begin to guess how angry I am," Avon corrected him. His grip on the control shaft was unnaturally tight. His knuckles white.

"Well, you have no _right_ to be," Blake shouted, flustered, suddenly boiling over. "I didn't _ask_ them to call you, I didn't _want_ you to intercede—" 

"Is that supposed to be _a point in your favor?_ " Avon looked ready to slap him. 

"This is something I care about—it isn't _about_ you. Frankly you could _support_ me," Avon turned a vicious glare on Blake at that, "but it's also none of your business."

" _None of my_ —" Avon seethed. "I should have left you to sit in a _cell_ over night?"

"It's just a cell! Don't do me any favors in future."

"How dare you," Avon hissed. "When you endanger yourself you involve me, and you know you do. Those warnings aren't _jokes_ , Blake. And I _know_ you intend to escalate your involvement. You _organized_ that protest, you didn't simply take part, correct? Don't bother answering. That demonstration had you written all over it. You are an _idiot_." An idiot who’d rallied several thousand students, which Avon was refusing to find impressive right now.

"Where do _you_ get off judging what I do?" Blake said. "We're not in a relationship—your decision, by the way—so I hardly think—"

"No, and neither are you my fiancé!"

"No," Blake agreed sarcastically. "No, I'm just the man you're waiting to be in a serious relationship with. It's very different. I should have fucked the university students who brought it up. Right as always, Avon. Let me just go back to campus and announce my availability, set up my dating calendar. How the hell was I _supposed_ to explain it?" Blake huffed. "And I _did_ notice your utter failure to affiance me, thanks." 

Avon's throat worked. "Don't joke about that."

"About what?" Blake asked honestly lost at this point.

"You and other people."

"Oh for _god's_ sake! The least important part of this argument—"

"It isn't to _me._ " 

"No," Blake rolled his eyes, "you aren't my intended or _anything_."

"Are there a lot?"

Avon hadn't meant to ask. It had just slipped out of his mouth.

"Of what?"

"Offers." 

"It wouldn't matter if there were," Blake said listlessly. "You own me. You know you do. Even if you don't use me. Well.” Blake exhaled. “Thank you for coming, I suppose. My hero."

Avon snorted. "I'm not anyone's hero."

"Don't tell me what I think.” The argument having died down, Blake looked around him, taking stock of the situation. “Avon, we're past curfew."

Avon glanced at the chronometer and realized Blake was right. Shit. 

"You don't have allowance to travel at this hour?"

Blake shook his head. "You only have yours for late meetings, remember? Campus is going to be sealed off by now."

Avon hadn't thought about it. They were going to his, at present—pointed in that direction. He'd wanted, without thinking it through, to take Blake home. To install him somewhere safe, where he could look at him and be assured that he wasn't in custody. "You'll have to spend the night at mine, then."

"What a pity," Blake said flatly.

"On the couch, you conniving little—And you will _never_ do this to me again."

Avon couldn't take it. When he'd received the call he'd feared the worst—the police station, 'Do you know a Roj Blake?' For a hideous, heart-stopping instant he’d thought he'd be identifying a body. They turned onto his street. 

"That's not going to happen," Blake said calmly. "Be reasonable. You know a lot of what the administration does is wrong. It's not going to stop unless people make themselves heard."

"I _also_ know it's dangerous to oppose it," Avon said, a little desperately. “Why should it be _you_ , Blake?”

"Look," Blake said as he got out of the transport after Avon and the vehicle whizzed back off to the depot, "I love you more than life and all that, but I'm not going to turn off my brain and my ethics for this relationship any more than you ever have." They entered the lobby.

"You're claiming _I’ve_ inspired your lunacy?" Avon asked, visibly stewing, nodding at the doorman (who watched them fight, as they boarded the lift, with an amused expression). 

"Like I said," Blake smirked as the lift doors closed, "my hero."

"You insufferable arse."

"I wish you would suffer it," Blake said with a mock-sigh. "Are you really going to make me sleep on the couch, Avon?" He pouted. "We could share your bed. Surely that's more sensible."  

"Take the couch," Avon hissed. " _God,_ I hate you."

"Liar." They'd come to Avon's apartment, and Blake lounged against the doorframe while Avon keyed in his entry code.

"Never to you," Avon corrected him automatically as they walked in, and wished he hadn't.

Blake stopped looking around with keen interest (he’d never been here before—he’d only even made it into the building at the Christmas party, having never been invited), and his eyes widened. He thought about it. "No, I suppose you never do. Then do you hate me less than you love me?" 

"Get some blankets and pillows—they're in the linen closet there. Handle it yourself. I'm going to bed."

"That's a yes, then. Goodnight, sweetheart."

Avon glared at Blake. Turned on his heel. Marched off to his room. 

***

It was a rest day. Blake woke up to the sound of Avon doing something in the kitchen. Making coffee, he guessed. Avon was never quite himself before having his initial cup. Blake usually made sure to bring it to him first thing, on his Aquitar days. Other people had caught on and filled in for Blake when he was absent, like primitives making offerings to a bleary, angry god (though none of them would have had the gall to usurp Blake’s duty when he _was_ present).

Blake listened, feeling luxuriant—there was a music in the sound of the man he loved going about his morning routine, moving quietly so as not to disturb him. He kept his eyes shut. He stayed that way when Avon walked closer to the couch and looked at him. Even with his eyes closed, Blake could feel Avon’s nearness, the weight of his gaze. Blake’s heart throbbed a little, at being so intensely observed. His breath almost caught when Avon traced very gentle fingertips over his cheek, and then passed them through Blake's curls. He hadn't intended to deceive Avon like this, but it would be awkward and a little cruel to undeceive him now. After a moment Avon left, shutting the door to his own room. 

Twenty minutes later, Blake faked his own waking, and Avon came out to join him. Blake raised his eyebrow to ask if he could have some of the coffee, and Avon waved him off, the gesture a sardonic ‘of course’, sticking out his own mug for Blake to refill it. Blake took it from his hand with a brief, gentle pressure of his fingers on Avon's wrist, and dressed it as Avon liked. 

"Listen," Avon said, "this small project I've been working on. It operates by unraveling the computerized calculations that govern people's credit—the system that allows loans. It essentially liquidates all private debt, and in the ensuing chaos, I intend to defraud a few, shall we say, undeserving organizations and individuals. I'm not exaggerating when I say it will entirely undermine confidence in the Federation banking system. The records will be utterly destroyed. It will take that system years to recover, if it ever can. Private individuals will be unharmed, _unless_ of course they collect dividends from the banks—in which case I am not terribly worried about their greater solvency."

"Forbearance," Blake breathed, impressed.

Avon grinned at him. "On an epic scale. It will take time, Blake. I anticipate finishing slightly after you graduate university. I will be left rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And you, if you _promise_ me not to do anything stupid while I set it up, can have the entire, corrupt economy in ruins. How is _that_ for sympathizing with your ideals?”

“ _Avon_ ,” Blake breathed, in about the nicest tone Avon had ever heard.

Avon held up a hand to forestall him. “However, the greatest blow ever struck against the state _logistically_ depends on your record remaining scrupulously clean." 

"Are you bribing me, Avon?"

"Oh yes. Keep out of trouble, help me do this—I will need assistance, Blake, and you're the only one I want to involve, the only one I know I can trust—and I'll accomplish your aims on a grand scale, and make you as rich as I am in the bargain." When one was a billionaire, one could afford to be very generous with one’s accomplices.

"What's yours is mine?"

"I thought in your own right," Avon deferred, as he thought 'even unto half my kingdom'. 

"You are," Blake said decidedly, "without a doubt, the cleverest and best of boyfriends."

"I am not," Avon smirked, unable to be entirely severe in the face of Blake's awed, delighted grin, "your 'boyfriend'." (Surely 'lover'—though granted, they hadn't. Partner, at least in a financial sense? Avon had actually rather enjoyed last night's suggestion of 'intended'. It had a pleasing ring of possessive predestination to it.) 

"No," Blake agreed, "not just yet." He chewed on his knuckle in thought (Avon watched), then looked up. "My family—"

"I've thought of that," Avon nodded. "Exit visas aren't impossible. We won't rush it. We have two years, after all."

"What do you need me to do?" Blake asked, all business, and sat on the couch next to Avon, thigh pressing against his, as Avon showed off his scheme.

At work, some weeks later, Avon frowned at him.

"I'm surprised at your restraint," he said.

"Mm?" Blake responded.

"You haven't dropped 'round," Avon explained. "I thought I'd have to chase you out with a broom, after I'd actually allowed you into my apartment. I know you memorized the door code." He hadn't bothered to hide the sequence. 

"Well, in line with our conversation after your Christmas party debacle, I thought I'd better be an adult about this," Blake said, a little chagrined. "Learn to respect your boundaries."

"…I see," Avon said.

"Avon," Blake asked carefully, getting it, "did you… want me to drop 'round?"

"We have a great deal of planning to do," Avon said vaguely. He didn't talk about the scheme in any detail anywhere but in his apartment, which he regularly screened for bugs. Thus he and Blake hadn’t spoken about the plan since the first day in his apartment, and while they both had component tasks they’d been getting on with, Avon had further details he wanted to clarify and get Blake’s opinion on.

"Well in _that_ case," Blake said with a smile that crinkled his eyes. And he was waiting for Avon, when Avon came back from a late meeting the next week, their next good opportunity. He'd ordered food.

Avon—tried not to enjoy it too much. He knew Blake might have gone through his flat thoroughly, looked at all the bookplates and music-cubes, gone through the drawers. He almost certainly had—Blake didn’t sleep on opportunities. He found the thought of Blake going through his things, proprietorially, both strangely sensual and dear. Later it occurred to Avon that Blake might possibly even have found the flat's single, framed photograph of Blake himself—his university-entrance portrait shot, his tunic slightly rumpled, his expression warm and quite, quite lovely, to Avon. Though the picture was well-hidden, and thus it was unlikely. 

Avon didn't let Blake stay so late that curfew would catch him out and he'd have to stay over again. He had at last formulated a bittersweet answer to the question of Blake. One that satisfied his conscience, if not his aching need.

So––right now––he could enjoy a few evenings and rest-days in Blake’s company. Storing them up against a long, unending winter to come. 

***

Roj Blake whistled while he dressed. His roommate Parr eyed him suspiciously. 

"You're cheerful."

Blake shrugged, grinning at his reflection, taking a lot of time to pick out his best clothes. "It's graduation, I'm allowed to be."

"You're _really_ cheerful, even for graduation," Parr observed. 

"Date tonight," Blake said. "After the family party."

"Aren't you engaged or something?"

"Yes," Blake said, declining to expand on this. He liked Parr a lot, but he hadn't even told his closest Freedom Party associates (Blake was still involved, though far less publicly than he had been—he helped Mari plan actions and the like) that his ‘fiancé’ and the boss he always went on about were the same person. Someone had suggested it once, and Blake had denied it without lying, laughed it off—"My boss has never asked me to marry him, no." Which didn't change the fact that an understanding nonetheless existed between the two of them.

"I'm not coming to your graduation," Avon had told Blake severely, a week ago.

"Good," Blake had said with a grin. "It'd only make you morose about the age business, and we're finally getting to the end of that. Besides, my parents will be there. I've spent six years never mentioning you to them, and it might be awkward. My daddy would break your jaw, Mister Avon," Blake said, the tone if not the played-up words a credible imitation of his fifteen-year-old self. 

Avon's eyes went huge and black. "Doctor," he corrected reflexively.

"Yes, sir. Mm, I'd forgotten you liked that."

"I—prefer my name."

"And I'll finally get a fitting venue to call you by your Christian—though the circumstances will hopefully be decidedly un."

"You can't have everything."

"Want to bet?" Blake asked cheekily. "I'll be at yours at ten on the day, if that's all right? I can't get away any earlier."

Avon nodded. "We'll talk then."

"'We'll talk then'," Blake mocked back. "Honestly. You'd better be prepared to drown me in sentiment, during and after the consummation."

"I’m not a very sentimental person," Avon said. 

Blake looked at him for a moment, then started to laugh fairly hard.

"What?" Avon snapped. 

"Nothing," Blake assured him. "How is my framed photograph doing, by the way? Keeping well, is it 'darling'?"

"I'm going," Avon said. "I've a meeting."

"No you don't, I know your schedule. Go and sulk. I'll see you at ten." Blake kissed Avon’s cheek too swiftly for him to dodge.

***

Avon’s apartment was unlocked, which should have been his first clue.

 _When did he find the time?_ Blake thought absurdly, staring around at the empty flat.

At 10:01 precisely, Blake’s datareader pinged with a note. _Here we bloody go,_ Blake thought, drawing it out of his coat pocket with a roll of his eyes and a distinctly unimpressed expression. He hadn’t carefully chosen his best jacket just to deal with Avon’s distancing bullshit. 

And there it was, the full-on, discreet ‘here’s how to finish the fraud without me, instructions below, etcetera etcetera.’ Oh, that just _figured_. 

Right, then. Two options. Blake was devastated and panicked, but neither was helpful at present. He was also angry, and _angry_ he could work with.

He bothered the doorman about when Avon had left—the doorman recognized him and just told him, when Blake half-charmed, half-bullied it out of him. Only an hour ago. Good. Avon wouldn’t have done too good a job on this, because he didn’t actually want it to work. Not with his full heart, anyway. You could always tell when Avon was committed to a thing—it was water-tight. When he didn’t think it was important, or it bored him, or he really thought it was a bad idea, he got slack.

So: gone to the nearest spaceport or the nearest high-speed rail station. Probably traveling to Hong Kong dome, at a guess, which he knew well and Blake didn’t. Which he could thus easily disappear in.

The doorman thought Avon had crossed the street—no, actually he was sure of it, because Avon had almost been hit by a transport (distracted, then—upset) and had looked furious about it. 

Rail, then. Avon would have needed to cross over to that side to catch a transport to the rail station.

Avon didn’t have permission for a relo, either, Blake thought as he hailed a personal transport of his own—Blake would know if Avon had quit work through official channels, which was probably why he hadn’t. Avon must’ve called in a favor and arranged a high-level pull-out with people he’d worked for in Hong Kong. They were important enough to smooth over a broken state contract, from what Blake understood. (Just professionally, Blake thought it was ludicrous that Avon was planning to leave with no handover period. He was a _division head_ ––did he think no one would notice? And of _course_ Avon didn’t care that everyone else would have to take up the slack—Blake loved Avon, but Avon could be a selfish, thoughtless fuck.)

Blake scanned his datapad for transports from London Dome to Hong Kong—he wouldn’t catch the express train in time, and Avon _would_ take the express. Blake checked his own account, temporarily fat with graduation-present money (Avon was going to _owe_ him). He changed the transporter’s destination to the spaceport.

***

Avon emerged from the train terminus in Hong Kong and blinked at Blake, who was waiting for him outside the gate. 

“Nín hǎo, Avon,” Blake said sarcastically.

“What,” Avon said intelligently.

“Did you know you can pay a shuttle pilot a frankly stupid amount of money to take you somewhere else on-planet, and that it's much faster, even, than the express?”

Avon blinked. “I did, actually—it was a plot point in a mystery novel.”

“Speaking of mysteries––”

“I explained the situation in full. You got my letter, I presume?”

“Oh,” Blake said darkly, “I got your letter, all right. _Coward_.”

Avon swallowed. “If you like. I—never could do it, in person.”

“Well, it was more of an insult to my intelligence than the in-flight magazine, but I did read it. I even remember how it goes. Allow me to paraphrase. ‘Here's the scheme, you won’t make yourself a necessary burden attendant on my attaining my ambitions’—when did you write this, by the way, 1800? ‘The money is going to automatically transfer to both of us, I needn’t oblige you by accepting a relationship I don’t need or truly want to get it, you love me dearly and tenderly and eternally’—thank you for finally saying it, though frankly it’s _not_ very much in evidence just now, Avon—‘and I should take that and bury it and, I don’t know, date the next twenty-one year old I see.’ Which of us is immature, again?”

Avon's jaw clenched. “Precisely. Go and find someone who doesn’t need to date ten years below himself. Leave _me_ alone.”

“I can’t. I haven’t got any money, for a start, and I’m not wiring my parents. You. My father. Broken jaw. We’ve been through this. They’re headed out to the colonies tomorrow, anyway." 

Avon looked bedraggled and wary, and his eyes were too big in his face, which was held too firm, like he'd been pointedly _not_ crying. Blake looked at him and relented. "I'm sorry, you're not immature. I appreciate everything you've ever done for me. I do. You're _stupidly_ noble. You respected me and you waited for me and this is, I very much hope, the last hurrah of your 'I'm not worthy' shite."

He smiled tenderly at Avon, a touch amused. "Listen: I've never met you before in my life. My name's Roj Blake. I have a decent engineering degree, dubious career plans, and, thanks to a mysterious benefactor, quite good prospects. You look like hell at present, but as though you'd clean up nicely. In fact, I think you’re gorgeous. How would you like to go to bed with me? What are your thoughts on running away together?"

Avon smiled at him, never quite able to resist Blake’s humor. “You’re a little young for me, Roj Blake.”

“That’s quite shallow of you, Kerr Avon. If you were twenty one, or I were thirty one, would you be able to think of a single decent reason why you and I shouldn’t be in love?”

"There would be no problems if you were my age," Avon said wistfully. If that _were_ the case, he’d have no decent reasons. No indecent ones. All of him wanted all of Blake. Even, especially, the difficult, exasperating bits—the stubbornness and decency that saw Blake arguing with him in the Hong Kong monorail terminus. "Supposing you would even be interested."

Blake laughed, tiredly. "You could make emotional problems for yourself if we lived alone on a perfect paradise island supplied with infinite food and freely-growing, lubricant-dispensing palm trees. You would find a way."

Blake sighed. Rubbed his face with his hands. "I'm angry and exhausted, you're upset and not admitting it. Cancel the transfer order, call in sick tomorrow, take me to whatever hotel you booked for the night and we'll just _sleep_. It's a criminal waste of my best jacket, and you know _damn well_ I had other plans, but we'll sleep, and in the morning we'll make the most of your sick day. And then we’ll go home. And we’ll see this through together, like we planned." 

"I'll put you up for the night—" Avon started. "It's a suite, there's a lounge. I’ll take the couch. We can discuss this—"

"No." Blake said, looking up at him. Voice less certain than it usually was. Even so, Blake was a man, now. He looked it. He acted it. Intelligence and force and resourcefulness. Avon was struck with how adult he was, in this moment.

"No more evasions,” Blake said with decision. “No more conversations where you don't say yes and you don't say no. No _favors_. Look, I chased you all this way because I _am_ sure of you. But if I'm wrong, if you're never going to get over this—if you never want to see me again, _really_ , then give me what a slow-return fare costs and I'll—let you alone. I’ll transfer out of Aquitar tomorrow—they’d let me, after a graduation—and I’ll work somewhere else until this goes through. I’ll won’t bother you, you’ll never hear from me. I'll try to _do_ something else with my life. Though I can't imagine what that should be, and I don't want to, and god _dammit_ Avon I need you to not be _ashamed_ of this, you break my heart. No—" he held up a hand to keep Avon where he was. "I'm not crying to make a damn point, I just can't control it. _Ignore it._ Yes or no. Pick one and _mean_ it." 

Blake was offering never to speak to Avon again, if they parted now. He might manage it, too. Blake was stubborn. As bad as him. Worse, perhaps. He would hurt Blake _so much_ in saying no and leaving, Avon could see that. Well. He'd eviscerate himself––he had done.

"I'm probably never going to get over it," Avon said. Blake's eyes widened and he stared at Avon like he'd been shot. "I've never been ashamed of you. I—" Avon swallowed. "Yes."

Blake regarded him, his jaw trembling a little. _Yes._ "You _mean_ that?"

"I said it, didn't I?" Avon said sharply. He stretched out a hand. It hung stupidly between them. "Will you let me—?"

Blake nodded. "All right."

Avon moved closer and held Blake, which was a little unwieldy now that Blake was ever so slightly taller than him. But he supposed he'd grow accustomed to it. After being unable to touch Blake for so long, he suspected he’d find it difficult to ever let him go.

"I hate crying," he murmured into the side of Blake's face.

"Because it's vulgar, I imagine," Blake said with a soft laugh.

Avon smiled wryly. "It isn’t when you do it. And I hate you crying for rather less aesthetic reasons."

"Try not to make me, then."

"I suppose I will." It would be the work of his life, Avon knew. Blake might have chosen an easier partner, less intrinsically sharp and awkward, less likely to bring him to this pass and others like it. But Blake seldom did anything the easy way. And neither did Avon. Fierce joy pulled through Avon like circulating blood. At _last_.

"How much was the shuttle?" Avon asked. Blake told him. Avon swore feelingly.  

***

"By the by," Blake said three months later, "you might want to take a look at this."

Their private shuttle had just lifted off from a frontier world en route to the more remote planet they were building their secure compound on. They'd paid for the shuttle in cash, and hired a pilot strongly recommended by the rebels—foundational works had already begun on their facilities.

"Hm?" Avon accepted a datacard and pushed it into his reader. Studied it for a moment. "Blake," he said slowly and distinctly, sitting up in his chair, "what am I looking at?"

"Rather a lot of classified information from various departments of Aquitar," Blake said complacently. "Normally, for security reasons, they're very good about keeping divisions from talking to one another much—"

"I know."

"Which is of course part of the reason they're getting nowhere fast—"

" _I know_."

"But they seem to assume the Apprentices won't have the intelligence or inclination to smuggle data around. Apprentices travel comparatively freely, and people don’t bother much about their security permissions, signing them in and out at different terminals to do this or that unpleasant task. I stayed at Aquitar longer than an Apprentice is supposed to stay on any one project. And you _did_ , with some reluctance, lend me out to other departments at times. Over the years I made friends, kept abreast, gossiped. And I kept the information I handled. It was interesting, and I knew I'd only get a slap on the wrist if they found me out. It would have looked like a child's careless mistake. Besides, I did it in drips and drabs. I suspected it might be politically useful, or that you'd like it as a present. Or a sort of dowry, if you like.” Blake tapped the exposed lip of the datacard with a finger. “With this data and help from the experts in the think-tank you’re building, perhaps we can work it out."

"Blake," Avon said, turning his head and staring at him in wonder, "Blake, I love you."

"You can do better than that, Avon," Blake chided. "That's top-of-the-line technology, industrial espionage of the highest order—you're holding what, the equivalent of a hundred million credits’ worth of data? That’s as much as we stole, over again. Oh, don't worry, I’ve made a back-up. See how much you've taught me?” Blake shook his head. “I'd never have thought to steal it, if not for your bad influence." 

Avon laughed the nicest laugh Blake had ever heard out of him. "Roj Blake you scheming, manipulative, handsome, incredible bastard, I love you to _pieces_ , pieces reassembled in perfect molecular order at the point-of-destination. Come and sit on my lap and let me adore you." 

" _Well_ now," Blake drawled, mocking Avon's customary tone and expression, "all right. If you _insist_."

**Author's Note:**

> beta'd by Aralias, first reader Elviaprose


End file.
